Burton should receive an A for effort. If in truth he has identified the killer—he concedes he has not identified a second...
A former U.S. State Department intelligence officer tries to solve a 1973 murder case.
Burton (Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent, 2008) lives in Austin, Texas, after a career as a policeman and a chief with the State Department Diplomatic Security Service. He is currently a vice president at Strategic Forecasting (STRATFOR), a private company that has been termed a “shadow CIA.” None of those jobs caused the author to forget a murder in his normally quiet Bethesda, Md., neighborhood when he was 16. The murder victim was Josef Alon, a husband and father who had lived in Israel and served as a successful fighter pilot before a diplomatic/military posting to Washington, D.C. Nobody harmed the daughters, and no robbery had occurred. After entering law enforcement, the author vowed that he would try to solve the homicide, unofficially and off the clock. Writing with military historian Bruning (co-author: House to House, 2007), Burton conveys an impressive passion to solve a mystery that higher authorities either did not want to solve or had already solved but refused to acknowledge. As the author guides readers through more than 35 years of on-and-off investigating, he shares speculative musings, evidentiary dead ends and occasional solid advances. Because so many individuals are direct or indirect suspects, many of them whom Burton cannot or will not name, others with apparent aliases, his investigation can be difficult to track, and long stretches without progress become tiresome. Eventually, he solved the murder, at least to his intellectual satisfaction. However, much of the evidence is circumstantial, and some of it is of questionable reliability, given its second-hand or third-hand nature in the minds of elderly men who have been employed as professional dissemblers.
Burton should receive an A for effort. If in truth he has identified the killer—he concedes he has not identified a second man who drove the getaway car—he should receive an A+ as a detective.Pub Date: April 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-230-62055-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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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