The shocking story of Dr. Michael Swango, who, despite being a convicted felon suspected of murdering dozens of his patients, was allowed to practice medicine. Best-selling author Stewart (Den of Thieves, 1991, etc.) brings us inside the life of a killer who thrived in a medical establishment where doctors typically cover up for other doctors, where hospital administrators live in constant fear of litigation, and where regulatory agencies don’t share crucial information. At Southern Illinois University’s medical school, Swango kept to himself, but classmates noticed that patients who came into contact with him tended to die. After graduating, Swango got a prestigious medical internship at Ohio State University. In February 1984 at Ohio State, patient Ruth Barrick died immediately after Swango treated her. Later a nurse saw Swango injecting a patient with a syringe; the patient almost died. The nurse who accused Swango was ignored and, in a pattern that would repeatedly benefit Swango, other doctors circled the wagons to defend their colleague. As more patients died, Ohio State initiated an in-house investigation, led by a fellow doctor, that fully exonerated Swango. Hospital administrators refused to even reprimand him, because they “didn’t want to be sued by Swango as a result of unfounded charges and nurses’ gossip.” When his internship was up, Swango worked as a paramedic in his hometown of Quincy, Ill. He related fantasies to his co-workers about killing people. When Swango brought in donuts, his co-workers got sick. After a few more poisonings, Swango was arrested and convicted. A felon, he nonetheless went on to practice medicine in South Dakota, New York, and Africa. In each place, patients died mysteriously under Swango’s care. Finally, upon his return from Africa, the FBI arrested the young doctor for falsifying medical records. He’s currently in prison, but could be released within three years. Although Stewart writes skillfully about the medical establishment’s unforgivable “code of silence,” he never quite succeeds in taking us very far into Swango’s warped mind. Thus, we—re left to guess about his psychotic motives and thought processes.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85484-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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