A frightening tour through America's gun culture by way of a single weapon — a semiautomatic hailed by its manufacturer as "the gun that made the '80s roar," and a single criminal — a troubled Virginia teenager who used the gun in a terrifying rampage. In December 1988, hoping to retaliate against a taunting class bully, 16-year-old Nicholas Elliot walked into his Virginia Beach high school and ended up murdering one teacher, grievously wounding another, and was only prevented from wreaking havoc by jammed cartridges. Wall Street Journal reporter Larson (The Naked Consumer, 1992) is after more than just an In Cold Blood-style narrative of a crime and its punishment. He outlines, painstakingly and chillingly, how the Cobray M-11/9, a weapon originally designed for battlefield use, ended up, like so many other guns across the country, falling into the wrong hands. How could the number of handguns grow so exponentially in America, from 16 million in 1960 to almost 67 million in 1989? The popular culture has fanned interest in them, from westerns that created the mystique of the American rifleman to media accounts of shooting sprees and movies and TV episodes that have boosted sales of exotic weapons. But Larson also finds "a de facto conspiracy of gun dealers, manufacturers, marketers, gun writers, and federal regulators" that have fed the huge demand. In the course of his research, Larson attended gun shows, visited a self-defense class that teaches women how to shoot, applied for and received a federal gun dealer's license, and interviewed a mail-order merchant of how-to guides to murder and the owner of the gun shop later found guilty of negligence in selling the handgun. He describes how the hard-core leadership of the National Rifle Association continues to hold sway over a more moderate rank and file and explains the workings of the toothless agency designated to enforce the nation's few gun laws, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (e.g., gun purchase records remain in the hands of gun dealers, who can obstruct the work of ATF agents). An urgent and, after the Long Island Railroad massacre, sadly timely wake-up call to stop America's "new tyranny" of gun violence.
Pub Date: March 9, 1994
ISBN: 0679759271
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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
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
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