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T he canonised writers of the past have a tendency to assume a fixed expression in their readers' imaginations. Dostoevsky always appears in the same aura of morbidly enthralling hysteria; Proust in the same velvety atmosphere of hyper-attuned sensory receptiveness.

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To think of Tolstoy is to conjure, at once, the note of impassive grandeur, as of creation being set out in glittering ranks for inspection. This elusiveness — a feature of both the life and the work — is a large part of what gives him his enduring fascination, as well as his striking modernity.

In Chekhov literature seems to break its wand like Prospero, renouncing the magic of artifice, ceremony and idealisation, and facing us, for the first time, with a reflection of ourselves in our unadorned ordinariness as well as our unfathomable strangeness. Ordinariness — the social fabric at its most drably functional — was to some extent his birthright. He was born in , in Taganrog, a provincial town on the Sea of Azov.

Said to be the shallowest sea on the planet, this minor appendage to the Black Sea shows up a muddy grey on satellite pictures, in contrast to the deep azure of the Black Sea itself. Whether this influenced the muted shading of Chekhov's prose — described by Nabokov as "a tint between the colour of an old fence and that of a low cloud" — history doesn't relate, but the city itself clearly became a key element in his imagination, forming the template for the stultifying provincial backdrops against which so many of his characters act out their dramas of ill-fated defiance or sullen resignation.

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His grandfather was a serf who bought his family's freedom. His father, Paul, ran a grocery-cum-general store where Taganrog society congregated to purchase rice, coffee, paraffin, mousetraps, ammonia, penknives and vodka, and were duly cheated by the proprietor.

Family lore records an occasion where a drowned rat was found in a cask of cooking oil. Instead of throwing out the oil, Paul had it "sanctified" by a priest, and continued selling it — an ur-Chekhovian episode, complete with a climax that is at once a non-event business going on as usual , and a pitiless illumination of the father's character.

A bullying, fanatically religious man as well as a total failure he went bankrupt in and fled to Moscow with the rest of the family, leaving the year-old Anton to fend for himself in Taganrog , the father too becomes a major generative element in his son's imagination. His presence can be felt in Chekhov's stories in the tyrannical father figures of "My Life" and "Three Years" as well as Jacob, the benighted zealot in "The Murder".

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In a more general sense, his spirit becomes absorbed into what might be called the negative pole in Chekhov's vision of reality: As a human being — a doctor who went out of his way to help the poor and needy — Chekhov was unambiguously repelled by this aspect of life, and many of his better known remarks are either denunciations of it or defences of its opposite, which he identified chiefly as culture, rationality and scientific progress. There is the famous retort to Tolstoy, whom he revered as a novelist but rejected as a teacher: But as an artist, Chekhov is more complicated than these apparently crystalline convictions suggest.

Certainly his stories are full of people who espouse views very similar to the above — enlightened misfits, philanthropic gentry, civilised professionals often doctors like himself holding a candle for reason, justice and all the rest. But the stories themselves invariably subject this posture to challenges that cast doubt over its relevance, even its basic validity, so that to pin down an authorial point of view becomes impossible. Decency and rationality lead to failure, self-disgust and madness in pieces such as "A Dreary Story" or "Ward Number Six".

In "The Princess", as in several other stories that feature do-gooding types, the philanthropic attitude is revealed as a rather nasty form of vanity. Even where it is sincere, it arouses baffling forces of resistance. Consider the well-intentioned couple in "New Villa", an engineer and his wife who settle in a rural spot after the engineer has built a bridge there.

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As if to extend the physical bridge into a social one, they attempt to befriend their peasant neighbours, only to find themselves opposed by malice and incomprehension at every turn. The bewildering irrationality of their treatment is brought home with gently comic poignancy by the story's ending, where the couple flee, selling their villa to a pompous government clerk who disdains the peasants, and is treated in return with paradoxical civility.

Comedy is of course another key element in Chekhov's imaginative armoury, and a further destabilising factor in the handling of his own "views". However tragic or despicable or exasperating the moralist in him found the world, the writer in him was constantly drawn to its comic variousness and oddity. Here they create a thought-provoking portrait by alternating passages from the well-educated killer's own diary, with the unfolding narrative of how the revelations of his crimes are affecting his family. It includes a surprising twist, and a powerful scene of confrontation near the end.

Naifeh, who has written for art periodicals and has lectured at numerous museums including the National Gallery of Art, studied art history at Princeton and did his graduate work at the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University.

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He has written many books on art and other subjects, including four New York Times bestsellers. His biography Jackson Pollock: Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Who would ever connect this handsome, charming, straight-arrow son of a perfect all-American family with the gruesome crimes of a serial killer?

Richard Daniel Starrett was the dangerous visitor for too many unlucky young women in Georgia and South Carolina in the late s. Read more Read less. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Customers who bought this item also bought. Here's how restrictions apply.


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Product details Mass Market Paperback: Onyx Books May 1, Language: I'd like to read this book on Kindle Don't have a Kindle? Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention true crime mentally ill gerry starrett danny starrett rapist and murderer victims and their families supposed to feel feel empathy think that the authors found the book danny and his family danny or his mother book i had read read the book feel that the book family family book have researched this book crimes prison jeannie.

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Showing of 26 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Mass Market Paperback Verified Purchase. Well written and provided a different perspective than most following not only the actions of Rotherham perpetrator but his mothers attempt to understand what led to her sons deviant and violent behavior. Pleased with this product. One person found this helpful. This book is still a stranger to me. I never finished it so I can't be a judge of it now. Maybe sometime later I can get into it.

I realize that the entire point of this book is that his family did not know him, but it is still irritating to read hundreds of pages about how clueless the mother was, and how she basically did not have any sympathy for the harm her son had done. Even if she truly believed he was mentally ill, it seems clear she only cared about her son, and had no sympathy for the girls he raped and killed one.

An unusual true-crime story, with an unconventional structure. A Stranger in the Family gives the criminal's perspective, his mother's, and a third-person narrator's. I hesitate to call his other voice a second personality, as I'm as skeptical as Dr. Storms that Danny really had mutiple personalities. I agree with many reviewers who feel that the book is as much about Gerry, Danny's mom, as it is about him.


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Also, I agree that there's a lot more here of Gerry and Danny than of his victims. Maybe this is an unconventional approach too; but I think an effective one. Undoubtedly, his victims have stories to tell, and they're the ones deserving our sympathy.

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The authors' choice to focus on Danny and his family shows those unfamiliar, evil actions that, luckily, most of us rarely glimpse. The victims represent us as a whole; our civilization attacked and injured by malevolent chaos. Both of the most complex issues raised in the book concern Jean.

It's strange that she didn't seem to mind being kidnapped, seemed not just to enjoy sex with Danny, but was developing a relationship with him before she died. Sure, some teenagers crave adventure, think they can handle anything, and feel indestructible, but still, even if she felt she was having tons of fun with Danny, one would think she might consider that she was putting her family through a hell of worry.

I said she 'died', not that she was murdered. It's impossible to know, because we have only Danny's incoherent testimony on the scene with the gun in the bathroom. Maybe he shot her; maybe they wrestled with the gun and she was shot accidentally, maybe she grabbed it, and not realizing that it was loaded, shot herself. She could've even tried to kill Danny, and he gets the gun from her, and then shoots her.

The fact that he confessed to murdering her isn't very convincing, given his delusional state, both at the time of the shooting and afterward. I find Gerry a very troubled person. I'm not excusing Danny in any way, but her obsession with maintaining appearances and her dominating personality led a perfect storm of denial in the face of an enormous amount of symptoms Danny was showing all through his young life.

It's ironic that Richard ended up marrying someone as stubborn as his father; if he and Gerry agreed nothing was wrong, then there was no problem.