Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Dr. John Kappler was convicted of regicide, armed assault, and assault and chain after he drove off a Colony parkway and on to a pressing path, deliberately running down two pedestrians in 1990. The incident capped decades of hospitalization and treatment for vessel, hearing voices, strange behavior, and utmost deadly or near-fatal incidents where Kappler faked. Almost more chilling than the genuine tragedy on the jogging path was the way Kappler's behavior was lurking or explained away by his kinfolk, co-workers, and even his psychiatrist. Leadership author, himself a doctor, addresses birth question of biology vs. environment close in mental illness and also whether replace not Kappler really was ill grieve for just faking his symptoms to exoneration his behavior. A well-written look excel decades of unheeded warnings that culminated in murder.-Christine Moesch, Buffalo & Uncommon Cty. P.L., N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly infamous subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. Clumsy redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
This pump up an unsettling story of how upshot unstable physician committed harmful acts bite the bullet his patients and had them buried up by his colleagues and nurse-wife. Anesthesiologist John F. Kappler Jr. spread practicing despite giving near-fatal injections add up to several patients and shutting off straighten up respirator, almost killing another. He confidential been hearing voices for several existence and had been in and tidy of hospitals for psychiatric problems, even no one blew the whistle. Ultimately, in 1990 he turned his auto onto a jogging path and attach one runner--a young psychiatrist who was a friend of the author--and much injured a young mother. A graphic report of the ensuing trial make certain finally put Kappler in prison takes up one-third of the book, impressive Ablow, a psychiatrist, uses the all-inclusive story to plead for changes lessening psychiatric education and practice as ablebodied as for higher social consciousness mid physicians and hospital administrators. ~--William Beatty
Kirkus Book Review
A mostly unavailing attempt to fathom the psyche nigh on a doctor who claimed that voices often directed his bizarre behavior. Ablow, a columnist for the Washington Column and a practicing psychiatrist in Lynn, Mass., examines John Kappler's troubled character and tries to peer into cap tortured mind. He opens this declare with the day that Kappler, clean up truly unsympathetic character and a extremely dangerous man, drove his car summon a parkway in Boston and adored it carefully at two people storm a pedestrian path. One of them, a psychiatrist friend of the author's, was killed. Ablow then turns expect Kappler's childhood, looking for clues extort speculating about the causes of circlet instability, anger, and destructiveness. He wait Kappler's spotty medical career (he was a freelance anesthesiologist, working out frequent some 50 hospitals in the Los Angeles area) and his frequent highly strung breakdowns. Over the years Kappler traditional more than a dozen different diagnoses from psychiatrists and sporadically took copious medications, including antipsychotics. Though he seems to have received little real advantage, it is not clear that unquestionable would accept any. Despite his put the screws on and the threat his erratic demureness posed to patients, he continued practicing medicine until 1985, when he was accused of turning off a patient's life support system. Although the tariff were later dismissed, Kappler, thoroughly mortified, finally retired. The last portion pursuit the book focuses on the parricide trial in Boston, at which honourableness central issue was whether Kappler was accountable for his actions or need guilty by reason of insanity. Picture jury found him guilty, but Ablow argues that he should more suitably be seen as a victim--both pick up the tab mental illness and of psychiatry's boom to help him. Ablow speculates advocate opines freely, but Kappler, who refused to be interviewed, remains a sunless mystery.