A scary piece of work, with even scarier implications.
A forensic psychiatrist takes well-turned clinical forays into the heads of multiple murderers, with additional long-distance thoughts on their peers in foreign countries and in the past.
Aided by veteran journalist Goldberg, Morrison shapes her experiences as a memoir and lets her prose express both analytical detachment and utter fascination. Nonetheless, she states, “I still could feel sickened about the nature of their crimes, no matter how detached I tried to be.” And these crimes are particularly dreadful. Morrison has spent 25 years trying to uncover some pattern to serial-killer behavior, a painstaking process of trying to understand why they do what they do by interviewing as many serial killers as she can get access to. Slowly the material accrues. John Wayne Gacy, she found, had the emotional makeup of an infant and “felt he was drowning when subjected to emotional complexity.” Robert Berdella displayed a total lack of empathy; he “couldn’t picture what the meaning of torture or even death is.” Serial killers typically show no social or psychological attachments, yet the author finds a terrible chemistry that suggests “serial murder at first sight exists and thrives much like love at first sight.” Killers had a “sudden urgency to get a victim. It wasn’t just a need; it was a drive, a compulsion”—an addiction of sorts. These discoveries pointed Morrison toward a genetic explanation of serial killing: something, she believes, causes an imbalance of the neurochemicals that trigger emotions and lead to actions. “I am firmly convinced there is something in the genes that leads a person to become a serial killer,” she asserts. “In other words, he is a killer before he is born.” Morrison has not been able to prove this theory conclusively, since her attempts to run tests on serial killers have, understandably, run into issues of free will.
A scary piece of work, with even scarier implications.Pub Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-052407-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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