Needs a jolt of energy, an injection of craft. (Author tour)
The felon-turned-author (Little Boy Blue, 1997, etc.) revisits the sorry, sordid scenes of his endless crimes.
Bunker claims he was conceived during a 1933 earthquake and born during a great deluge; that his "first clear memories" are of his parents "screaming at each other"; and that his first robbery was at age four: a Good Humor truck. The memoir ends in the mid-1960s: Bunker is serving yet another prison sentence, this one at San Quentin ("always my joint," he says wistfully), when a phone call informs him that Norton will publish the novel he has submitted (the sixth he has written) and that Harper's will feature his story about prison race wars. Sandwiched in between are surprisingly tedious accounts of his indiscriminate felonies—ranging from check kiting to armed robbery—arrests, incarcerations, escapes, beatings, and start-and-stop efforts to educate himself. Bunker declares his talent in several places (his IQ was once measured at 152), but this memoir contains little supporting evidence. When he pauses to reflect, which is rare, he can manage only banalities like "Truth is the distilled meaning of facts" or "I believe that anyone who doesn't read remains dumb." At other times he refers to the monster as "Frankenstein," observes that the "past is prelude" rather than "prologue," and does not seem to know the precise titles of two novels (The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf) by fellow ex-con and autodidact Jack London. His metaphors are sometimes so mixed as to be meaningless: "Amid the ozone of fear of the unknown ahead there was a convivial leavening." Although there is an inherent poignancy in the tale of a man struggling for redemption in the worst of conditions, the effect is often vitiated by excess—as in Bunker’s paragraph of explicit directions for committing a perfect murder.
Needs a jolt of energy, an injection of craft. (Author tour)Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25315-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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
PERSPECTIVES
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