A revealing look at the real, deeply unpleasant work of murder investigators.
A literate, unfailingly interesting work of true crime by a veteran of the genre, picking up where his The Killing Season (1997) left off.
Those readers who were glued to the set during the long, tawdry trial of O.J. Simpson will be forgiven for thinking the LAPD’s detective division to be a nest of incompetents, Corwin allows. Homicide Special’s “maladroit investigation” and Simpson’s acquittal were low spots in an already hit-or-miss record. But, almost as soon as Simpson went free, the division was overhauled, with most of its staff forced into retirement or transferred. In their place came the elegantly dressed, multilingual, sophisticated cops (one lieutenant a former chef, another officer a former sales executive, and so on) who figure in Corwin’s recounting of half a dozen grisly cases as they slowly unfold. One is the murder of a Ukrainian prostitute, which affords an intriguing glimpse into the seedy world of the Russian mafia, with an array of suspects: “. . . looking like a caricature,” Corwin writes, one of them “wears a gray leather jacket, a gold Gucci belt, and a garish pink, black, and white silk shirt.” Another, a poorly staged suicide involving a Viagra-popping, toupee-wearing would-be stud and his unfortunate girlfriend, offers a fine glimpse into good cop-bad cop procedure (“The sympathetic approach is the best way,” one weary cop remarks, though toughness clearly works, too). Still another—and Corwin’s one big nod to the noirish possibilities of Hollywood—draws on recent headlines to recount the unit’s investigation of B-grade actor Robert Blake, whose thoroughly unlikable wife conveniently ended up with a bullet in her head as Blake ducked into a restaurant to retrieve his own gun: a strange matter indeed, one in which nothing made sense until the dogged detectives turned up the hard evidence that had eluded them in that earlier celebrity case.
A revealing look at the real, deeply unpleasant work of murder investigators.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-6798-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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