Veteran true-crime writer Bledsoe (Before He Wakes, 1994, etc.) offers a vividly bifurcated portrait of a woman who was by turns a cruel killer and a loving grandmother. Velma Barfield was the first woman in 20 years to be executed in the US when she was given a lethal injection in North Carolina in 1984. She had confessed to killing four people with arsenic (though she was tried and convicted for only one death). Her path to crime: After a childhood of poverty and abuse, Velma made a happy marriage and devoted herself to her two children. In turn, they looked after her when a series of ailments led to Barfield’s addiction to a shelf-ful of painkillers and sedatives. Often drugged to a stupor, and further afflicted with undiagnosed manic-depressive illness, she grew selfish and shrewish, poisoning her mother as well as her boyfriend and two elderly people who employed her as a caregiver (after forging their signatures to obtain money for her drugs). The second half of Bledsoe’s smooth and engrossing narrative depicts the —other— Velma Barfield—the woman who found God after her murder conviction and served while in prison as a spiritual mentor and confidante to other women prisoners, earning their love and that of prison administrators and chaplains. This Velma, as Bledsoe makes clear, might have been best sentenced to life in prison. The author’s account also evokes the drama of intriguing conflictual characters: Joe Freeman Britt, the near-fanatical prosecutor who obtained her conviction; Jimmy Little and Dick Burr, the lawyers who selflessly volunteered years of work without pay, trying to get Barfield’s death sentence overturned; and Pam and Ronnie, Velma’s children, whose lives were thrown into turmoil. Bledsoe’s balanced and thorough examination raises important questions about the death penalty and how it is applied.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-525-94255-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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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