An incomparable, epic nonfiction police procedural, covering one year with a Baltimore homicide squad—and a dizzying circus of mayhem and stark horror at vast length. Simon, a police reporter for the Baltimore Sun, spent 1988 as a fly on the wall with Baltimore's homicide unit. Here, he tells what it was like to investigate dozens of Baltimore's 234 murders that year. We follow three homicide squads from first alert by phone to arrival at the body, through first investigation of the crime scene, questioning of witnesses, and writing up reports back at the police department. Subjectively, however, we are right over the shoulder of the investigating detectives, sharing their horrifying safety-valve humor in the face of headless suicides, bullet-riddled corpses, a gutted 11- year-old girl and so on. This story is about turning over rocks on rock bottom and looking for what squirms. Murderers, it turns out, don't act like they do on TV—nor do the detectives: with the exception of suspects who kill loved ones in a rage, killers are utterly remorseless, and whatever stress they feel is tied to being the target of an investigation. Meanwhile, the detectives have to face protocol within the squad and among the three rival daily squads as well as a bedeviling tote board for daily cases and yearly wins and losses. Homicide is a rarified unit, for superhumanly motivated detectives who handle superhuman caseloads and investigate only those cases that seem to have leads; meanwhile, they carry forward last year's cases while attending trials and being witnesses. Family life gets brutally sacrificed, and starting up second families is the norm. Baltimore, Simon tells us, is now ``virtually equal'' to Washington ``on the national murder hit parade....'' During the book we follow three or four of the more blisteringly intense investigations that dominate the department's attention while other bloody, lead- filled, knifed, or strangled bodies fall daily and cool under our eyes. Deserves great praise and looks like a big winner.
Pub Date: June 5, 1991
ISBN: 0-395-48829-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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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