Highly literate and by turns convincing, depressing, even humorous, thanks to P.G. Wodehouse’s delicious “Jeeves and the...
So much to steal, so many ways to steal it. Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, the good old stickup, and more find their way into this tangy anthology of pieces on Big Apple crime from Adrenaline series editor Willis (NYPD, 2002, etc.).
The writing throughout the 14 previously published selections is crackling good, and the crimes rise off the page in an oily funk from rascals and loathsome perps. Pete Hamill’s “Notes from Underground” lets readers identify with subway gunman Bernard Goetz: “Being trapped on the subway by four bad guys demanding not a dime or a quarter but five dollars is similar to the nocturne about the burglar beside the bed in the dark.” Then come several items voiced with the brilliant, flat delivery of inter–World War writers, including “Mom, Murder Ain’t Polite,” by Meyer Berger (“It has been Anna’s experience that you become accustomed to murder if you see enough of it”), and “The Wily Wilby,” by St. Clair McKelway, who cites an accountant telling his client that a former treasurer of their firm “had hidden his defalcations so adroitly and with such originality that it had been a real pleasure to uncover them.” (The absence of Joseph Mitchell from the collection is felt, though not keenly, since the quality of the material is so high.) A couple of juicy pieces limn post–Civil War New York’s chicanery, corruption, and brutality, a state of affairs that very much included the police, described by Luc Sante in an excerpt from Low Life (1991) as “a repressive and profit-gathering force halfway between gangsters and politicians, having to serve as interpreters between the two.” In “The Annals of Manhattan Crime,” attorney Patrick Wall crisply encapsulates 87 famous crimes committed in the city, and Calvin Trillin contributes a silky-smooth report on two cheesy insider traders, “Marisa and Jeff.”
Highly literate and by turns convincing, depressing, even humorous, thanks to P.G. Wodehouse’s delicious “Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest.”Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56025-527-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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