Readers might wonder why King’s account suddenly surfaces 31 years after the killings, but true-crime fans and Manson...
An oddly timed, incredibly detailed account of the most famous of the Manson Family’s victims.
Throughout the summer of 1969, America was transfixed by a series of brutal murders in and around Los Angeles. The victims ranged from an anonymous, well-to-do couple to an heiress to the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate. Exhibiting an almost voyeuristic passion for his topic, King (The Duchess of Windsor, 1999) unearths a staggering trove of information on Tate, an actress who died at 26 with barely a handful of films and television appearances to her credit. Beyond limning Tate’s short life, King takes readers into the midst of the Manson “family,” profiling her killers’ pasts, the sex and drugs rites of the Manson family, and the career of Manson himself (the criminal and failed pop idol who was convicted of compelling them to murder). Making extensive use of seldom-seen material (including police and detective reports, photographs of the murder scene, Manson family-member parole trial transcripts, and interviews with principal and secondary characters like Tate’s mother, Doris, and surviving relatives of other Manson family victims), King unflinchingly recreates the brutality and utter randomness of the events of early August 1969. Beyond the sensational reportage (including a harrowing and grisly, minute-by-minute account of the murders of Tate and the four others at 10050 Cielo Drive), King reveals the condition and whereabouts of Manson family members while including some lucid and trenchant observations on the continuing cult of Manson (e.g., the merchandising of Manson’s image). King also details the victims’-rights advocacy work of Tate’s mother and sister.
Readers might wonder why King’s account suddenly surfaces 31 years after the killings, but true-crime fans and Manson fetishists (you know who you are) will find it irresistible.Pub Date: June 15, 2000
ISBN: 1-56980-157-6
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Barricade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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
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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