Showing 1 - 10 of 171 annotations tagged with the keyword "Homicide"

The Best Minds

Rosen, Jonathan

Last Updated: Jun-26-2023
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Biography

Summary:

The Best Minds is the true story of the lifelong friendship between the author, Jonathan Rosen, and Michael Laudor.  To an extent, as children and young adults, Rosen lives in his brilliant friend’s shadow.  While both attend Yale, it is Laudor who graduates summa cum laude in three years.  Laudor applies and is admitted to all the top law schools, and, at twenty-four, seems to be destined for great things.  Then, a switch flips. His parents have been replaced by Nazis, or so he claims.  He roams the house with a kitchen knife.  His mother locks herself in the bathroom and calls the police.  Rosen gets a call.  His friend is in a psychiatric hospital. He has been diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia.  

After being stabilized on antipsychotics, Laudor is discharged to a halfway house and begins to attend a day hospital.  “Painfully aware of where he had been and where he ought to be” (p.243), he is advised to get a job as a cashier at Macy’s. Instead, he makes the extraordinary decision to matriculate at Yale Law School, whose acceptance he has deferred. At school, he wakes up every morning believing his room is on fire, “paralyzed with fear until his father called and told him the flames weren’t real” (p.277). Incredibly, with the encouragement of the dean and faculty, who “create a day hospital” (p.262) for Laudor and his classmates who read, edit, and type his work, he manages to graduate.   

Laudor looks for a job, but determined to be open about his illness, seems unemployable. Nevertheless, he is in a unique position to be a powerful advocate.  He is interviewed by the New York Times and is portrayed in glowing terms in a widely circulated article. There are bidding wars among several publishers for a book he is to write.  Leonardo DiCaprio expresses interest in playing him in a film. He receives a large advance which obviates the need for employment. For the director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) this is the perfect “opportunity to give the world a positive image of someone with serious mental illness” (p.406).   

Unfortunately, Laudor is not compliant with his medication.  His personal care and his thought processes deteriorate. However, since he knows how to “avoid the buzzwords that could trip a psychiatric alarm” (p.423) he evades treatment. Eventually he spirals into full-blown psychosis, and convinced his fiancée has been replaced by a wind-up doll, he stabs her to death.

Laudor is considered unfit to stand trial and is committed to a forensic psychiatric facility.  His book is never written, and the film director who was to tell his story instead makes A Beautiful Mind, which wins many awards.  After years of estrangement, Jonathan Rosen begins to visit his childhood friend again.  Laudor remains institutionalized to the present day. 

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George and Rue

Clarke, George Elliott

Last Updated: Apr-06-2023
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

George and Rufus (Rue) are born one year apart into grinding poverty of a Nova Scotia community, to a violently abusive father and a frightened well-intentioned mother. They have mixed heritage, part Black, part Mi’kmaq. Battered and hungry, they struggle with learning and abandon school after several attempts at grade three. 

George is stolid, strives to be good, serves briefly (and badly) in the military, and is happiest doing heavy physical work for farms, gardens, and woodlots. But he can never hold a job for long. He marries Blondola and they start a family in Fredericton, New Brunswick. 

Rue is more dashing, calculating, and slippery. He has a self-taught talent for piano and cultivates an odd form of jazz. He falls in love twice and loses both times--first to an accidental death and next to his own imprisonment. Arrested for theft, he serves two years in prison and, upon his release, barges into George’s marginal existence, contributing nothing and menacing the precarious but loving home. 

When Blondola goes into hospital for the birth of her daughter, the doctor refuses to let her leave until his bill is paid. George needs money desperately. Rue convinces him to use a hammer to stun a white man – any white man—and take his money. Together they settle on targeting a taxi driver, but the man who responds to the call is George’s friend. He cannot go through with it, but Rue clobbers the driver, cajoles George into robbing the dying man and dealing with the evidence.

The brutal murder and shockingly clumsy aftermath of their barely disguised deeds results in their arrest. During the police interrogation, George tries to explain his innocence and blames his brother. They are tried within the racially intolerant British-inherited court system that wrongly flatters itself to have avoided American excesses of racism. They are executed on the gallows, hanging side-by-side. 

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Summary:

Anna Gasperini builds on existing scholarship by examining how Victorian ‘penny blood’ literature depicted working-class readers’ anxieties concerning medical dissection following the 1832 Anatomy Act. Within the historical context of Britain, a dearth of cadavers spurred the rise of various crimes, including body-snatching, graverobbing, and murder. While the families of the middle- and upper-class dead could finance a funeral and secure a place of safe rest, such as in an ancestral vault or tomb, the poor were often buried in shallow or mass graves. These burial sites were often unearthed, and the bodies were sold to (knowing and unknowing) medical men for anatomical examination. To quell these crimes, government authorities instated the 1832 Anatomy Act, which was “a law that allowed anatomists to source dissection material from the pauper” (xii). More specifically, Gasperini explains, “[w]hen it was passed, the Anatomy Act imposed that the bodies of those who were too poor, or whose families were too poor, to afford a funeral were to be handed over to the anatomy schools for dissection” (xii). The Anatomy Act, disregarding pauper consent and personal wishes, effectively targeted impoverished people who relied on workhouse support and alms, exploiting poor bodies to supply medical schools and advance research. The fear and disgust for the law were widespread: “. . . for them [working-class penny blood readers] dissection, bodysnatching, and forfeiture of one’s body to the anatomists after 48 hours under the Anatomy Act were a terrifying reality” (xiii). This fear oddly presaged Count Dracula’s remark in Tod Browning’s 1931 film: “There are far worse things awaiting man than death.” In other words, the finality of death may be incomprehensible, but posthumous desecration of the body through dissection provokes a deeper sense of horror.

Exacerbating the act’s legal conditions was the fact that “semi-literate” working-class people, although vaguely aware of the law’s significance, could not fully interpret the dense legal argot that described the new regulations—an example of cruel political skullduggery—which obscured what would happen to their bodies following death (12–13). Far from being a benevolent political gesture, the act “. . . was an exercise in rhetoric, against which the pauper—semi-literate, socially powerless, and politically underrepresented—could not possibly win” (15). Popular fears that predated and intensified following the act concretized suspicion and anger directed at physicians, the medical sciences, and mortuary practices.

These apprehensions, Gasperini argues, found vivid expression in the pages of the penny blood, a genre “churned out by underpaid hack-writers” and obsessed with storylines “involving murder, betrayal, gender-shifting, and the occasional supernatural event (not to mention scantily clad damsels in distress)” (4). While the penny blood’s serialized melodramas were derided as tawdry sensationalism by middle- and upper-class readers, the genre reflected working-class preoccupations about the Anatomy Act and how the bodies of the impoverished dead were subject to the posthumous medical gaze (4). The penny blood embraced a “generally more violent and graphic concept of entertainment that was popular among lower class individuals. . . .” (4) and constructed plots that directly tapped into long-entrenched suspicions about medical cruelty and physical dismemberment. While the era’s educated readership disdained the recognizable tropes of the penny blood—murderous graverobbers, devious surgeons, vampires, eldritch cemeteries, and cadavers—the narratives in which they figured elucidated the virulent classism and exploitation perpetuated by the Anatomy Act. 

Gasperini provides close readings of a range of penny blood texts, including Manuscripts from the Diary of a Physician (1840s), Varney the Vampyre; or: the Feast of Blood (1840s), The String of Pearls (1840s, popularly referred to as Sweeny Todd, The Demon-Barber of Fleet Street), and The Mysteries of London (1840s). Not all narratives have explicitly medical themes or characters who are physicians or anatomists, nor do the stories make overt reference to the Anatomy Act. Instead, as Gasperini’s analyses demonstrate, they all confront larger working-class anxieties concerning mortality and what might be regarded as the social afterlife of a human corpse, whether that be posthumous dissection, cannibalism, necrophagy, or some other horrific desecration of the body. Fundamentally, while the stories vary, they share a general preoccupation with the corpse’s “bodily integrity” (16), asking what forces act upon the body (or have the authority to) following death and expressing fear over the individuals and institutions that presume to disturb the repose of the dead. Indeed, for all the penny blood’s grotesquery, there is a tacit insistence on the sanctity of the corpse; however, as Gasperini illustrates, the genre does not flinch from revealing the grim consequences of disturbing this repose in the interests of greed and medical progress.

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What She Left Behind

Wiseman, Ellen

Last Updated: Jan-03-2023
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Izzy is a teenager who has been in foster care for a decade since the age of 7 when her mother was imprisoned and judged insane for having killed her father. She struggles with a desire to cut herself. Her current foster parents, Harry and Peg, seem kindly and engage Izzy in their task to catalogue artifacts from the nearby state asylum that has recently closed. 

Izzy is given the journal of Clara, a patient who, at age 18 in 1929, was pregnant by her Italian lover, Bruno. She was committed to the asylum by her angry father.  Clara gave birth, but her baby girl was taken from her. She observed how the brutality of the hospital damaged those who did not belong there, eventually provoking the mental illness it purported to treat. With the help of a gravedigger, Bruno planned an escape, but their plan was uncovered, and Bruno died.

Izzy’s own story unfolds as she works her way through the journal, subjected to bullying and tormented by her anxieties. Peg kindly arranges to take Izzy to see her dying birth mother in prison, where she learns that the murder of her father was to prevent him from abusing young Izzy.  

Spoiler alert! Izzy learns from an elderly nurse that the asylum director took Clara’s baby for himself and that Clara is still alive. She reunites the mother and child, who is now a grown woman. Izzy joyfully learns that Peg and Harry will formally adopt her.

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Station Eleven

Mandel, Emily

Last Updated: Oct-27-2022
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

In the not-too-distant future, Arthur Leander, a famous actor, suddenly collapses and dies on a Toronto stage in the final act of King Lear.. That same night the deadly and highly contagious Georgian Flu reaches North America from Russia. Within days, civilization, as we know it, collapses: no electricity, no gasoline, no water, no travel, no Internet, no information, no medicine, and no escape. A handful of survivors hide in their separate lairs, until their resources are depleted and then they flee on foot, at first alone, stealing and foraging for food, trusting no one, and learning to kill. Surviving. The story takes place in Year 20 after the collapse with frequent visits to the past. 

Without realizing it, the protagonists are all connected to Arthur– his ex-wives, young son, best friend, a child actor, the paramedic who tried to resuscitate him at the theatre. Older people remember and mourn the “before time” and its marvels that are lost, perhaps forever. In oppressive heat, a troupe of musicians and actors, called the Traveling Symphony, moves from place-to-place around the Great Lakes, performing music and Shakespeare’s plays because “survival is insufficient.” Usually, they bring pleasure and diversion. But they must take care, as some villages are led by cult-like prophets, intent on control by theft, rape, and murder. Only at the end do they reach Severn City, where a fledging community has created a semblance of peace and respect in an abandoned airport with a museum devoted to all that is lost.

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The Way of All Flesh

Parry, Ambrose

Last Updated: Oct-04-2022
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Will Raven is a medical student beginning his apprenticeship with Dr James Young Simpson. He has been involved with a prostitute Evie whom he finds murdered. Simpson’s housemaid, Sarah Fisher, takes a dislike to him, not least because of his educational and social privileges. She is barred from such opportunities because of her gender and class, despite her greater intelligence. Sarah studies medicine on her own. Coming from poverty, Raven is nevertheless, pompous, chauvinistic, quick to fight, and desperate to earn money and status. 

Like Evie, other young girls are being brutally murdered in the Old Town of Edinburgh, and Raven and Sarah are separately motivated to find the killer. Their master, Simpson, is conducting experiments with anesthesia and suspicions are cast upon him. Although Raven and Sarah are part of his household, they find his behavior mysterious. Eventually they collaborate to solve both mysteries.

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Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

The author’s beloved Jewish mother is a great storyteller. A favorite tale describes how her grandmother was shot dead while sitting on the family’s Winnipeg porch nursing her baby. An accomplished investigative journalist, author Hoffman assumes it is fiction but decides to investigate. He is astonished to discover that, indeed, his great-grandmother was murdered, although the details deviate slightly from the family tradition. 

Through official records, the Census, and newspaper accounts he pieces together the circumstances of her life and death and the frustrated search for her killer. In the process, he learns a great deal about his ancestors and the world of Jewish immigrants in early twentieth-century Canada. Eager to share his findings, he is confronted by his mother’s decline into dementia and the poignant difficulties of grasping and reshaping memories, both collective and individual. 

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The King's Anatomist

Blumenfeld, Ron

Last Updated: Jan-03-2022
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Brussels mathematician Jan van den Bossche, (fictional), single, and fifty years old, is devasted to learn of the death of his lifelong friend, the brilliant (and very real) anatomist Andreas Vesalius.  Companions since childhood, shorter, sturdy Vesalius was the outgoing exuberant leader of the duo, snubbing authority, taking risks, and seizing every opportunity to explore the anatomical structure of animals and humans. He constantly dragged the quiet, shy Jan in his exploits.  

News of Vesalius’s death sends Jan in two directions. First, he wanders back through many memories: their lives and travels together to Paris, Leiden, Padua, Spain; the rise of Vesalius’s fame in anatomy, medicine, and surgery; and his odd departure from academe to serve foreign crowned heads in France and Spain. Second, it propels him forward on a journey to his friend’s grave on the Greek island of Zante (now Zakynthos), in an effort to comprehend why the notorious skeptic would have embarked on a religious pilgrimage in the first place. Jan realizes that he can forgive Vesalius almost everything, including the theft by marriage of his beloved Alice. But he is incapable of pardoning the bewildering manner of his death.

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Imprimatur

Monaldi, Rita; Sorti, Francesco

Last Updated: Nov-03-2021
Annotated by:
Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

In a future 2040, the church is considering the canonization of Pope Innocent XI. An unusual seventeenth-century manuscript is brought to the attention of the authorities and the bulk of the novel is its transcription in full.  

The manuscript is the diary of an intelligent, but inexperienced young orphan-apprentice who is working in a Roman hostel in September 1683. The Catholic Church is fighting the Ottoman Turks who have besieged Vienna. Tensions with France are high as that country and its king have long asserted their exemption from Church rule.

 A hostel guest dies, and the authorities, suspecting plague, impose a quarantine. The apprentice falls under the influence of another confined guest, Atto Melani, a famous castrato and spy for King Louis XIV of France. Believing that the deceased guest was murdered, they venture out each night into subterranean Rome searching for clues to support their theory and leading them to investigate poisons, panaceas, and political plots. Meanwhile, a physician also confined to the hostel attempts all remedies to prevent plague, while another guest, besotted with astrology, strives to reveal the future, and yet another plays soothing music. 

Like a baroque Agatha Christie novel, plausible suspicion is cast upon every guest until the truth emerges and with it many doubts about the saintliness of Pope Innocent XI. The 2040 writer invites the Holy Office to consider the implications of the manuscript before proceeding with the canonization.

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Everything is Fine

Granata, Vince

Last Updated: Oct-03-2021
Annotated by:
Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Vince Granata, the author of Everything is Fine, remembers feeling at the age of 4 that the day his triplet siblings were brought to their suburban Connecticut home from the hospital was the best day of his life.  For many years, to all appearances, his was the perfect family.   

Then, while in college, his brother Tim develops a psychotic disorder.  Refusing treatment, he becomes more and more delusional.  He speaks frequently about killing himself and is convinced his mother has raped him.  Announcing that “demons are everywhere” (p.115) he enters his parents’ bedroom and throws salt at them as they sleep. His mother, though trained as an emergency physician, dismisses the idea he could become violent: “Everything is fine” (p.122).  

When Vince receives a phone call that his brother has killed his mother, he rushes home from teaching abroad to find yellow tape surrounding the house.  The immediate, surrealistic concern is to have a company clean the traces of his mother from the rug.   

Over the next few years, Tim is treated to restore him to competency so he can stand trial.  Vince and his father visit Tim faithfully in a facility while two other siblings cannot bring themselves to face him.  A friend insightfully prophesies “I hope you will eventually be able to find some peace and feel whole again…though that might be your life’s work” (p. 149). Indeed, while his brother recuperates, Vince goes through his own healing process. He dedicates himself to understanding schizophrenia and the shortcomings in our mental health care system, and, finally, writes this book.  

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