At first muddled and confusing, the book goes on to raise intriguing questions and possibilities for fans of both men.
A father-and-son team exposes the similarities of two very strange men, Jack the Ripper and Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Friedmans intersperse a biography of Doyle with a re-enactment of a tour of a handful of sites where the Ripper’s victims were killed. The original tour, which included Doyle, was an activity undertaken by a group the press referred to as the “Murder Club,” a dining club comprised of professional men who debated popular criminal cases (“admission to the club became one of the most sought-after prizes in the realm”). The authors have cast Doyle as leader of the tour, with a fictitious assortment of Ripper followers, including an American doctor, two ladies, two brothers, a lawyer and a financier. From the first, Doyle becomes the formulaic Holmes character, exuding pedantry and disdain for any theories not his own. His superiority complex and the never-ending scraps of information from his pockets eventually become tedious. The biographical sections of the book are much more interesting, as the authors expose the man with a titanic ego who always had a good excuse for his failures—e.g., even his thesis listed barriers that prevented a better paper. Doyle’s transcripts from medical school have been altered, and his letters home do not gel with actual events as he developed his fiction writing. His medical career never took off, but his schooling exposed him to three brilliant diagnosticians who provided the perfect model for Sherlock Holmes. Throughout, the Friedmans have the tour members discussing the intelligence, surgical ability and misogyny that could apply to both Holmes (Doyle) and the Ripper. The biography ends with the first Holmes mystery published in 1887, the year before the Ripper murders. “It would take four more years for Doyle’s consulting detective to bring him fame and fortune,” write the authors.
At first muddled and confusing, the book goes on to raise intriguing questions and possibilities for fans of both men.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7570-0348-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Square One Publishers
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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