Acclaimed novelist Vann (Caribou Island, 2011, etc.) alternates his own adolescent fantasies about guns and school shootings with those of Steve Kazmierczak, who on Valentine's Day 2008 killed five and wounded 18 on the Northern Illinois University campus before ending his own life.
The author’s notes that his back story and that of Kazmierczak are similar. Though an outwardly well-behaved, exceptional student, Vann began an obsession with guns at age 13 after his father's suicide; the author had easy access to the weaponry his father left behind. When he read about Kazmierczak's rampage, the author felt compelled to investigate and obtained an assignment from Esquire. Gaining access to Kazmierczak's 1,500-page police file, Vann delved into the reasons for the mass murder. Those who had known Kazmierczak only during his years as a NIU student might have seen a dedicated scholar in the making, a potential professor of criminology who earned high grades and participated in campus activities. By relying on the law-enforcement files, however, Vann began to understand the demons of a manic depressive individual who had used powerful medications heavily, demonstrated suicidal tendencies for years, become alienated from family members and found it difficult to maintain friendships and romantic relationships. Although he rarely deviates from his own history and the arc of Kazmierczak's troubled life, Vann occasionally provides background on previous campus mass murderers (including the 2007 tragedy at Virginia Tech) and on the ease of purchasing deadly weapons in the United States. A carefully crafted account of a descent into fatal madness.
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8203-3839-2
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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
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
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