4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Well-Written Book!, May 3, 2006
What a page-turner this is! The main theme in the six chapters of this book is the exhumation of human remains to help settle controversial issues, most of which are of historical value. The book is written in such an engaging style that the pages turn themselves. The cases discussed range from early nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Although forensic techniques are discussed to an adequate degree, they are not belabored at the expense of other equally important details; thus, the reader is presented with well-balanced information that helps in establishing a good overall perspective of each case. The book's forte is really in the logical and suspenseful way in which each case is developed and presented. At the end, one is left with the feeling of wanting still more cold cases to read about. This excellent work would be of great interest to those who enjoy literature on true crime, history, forensics and unsolved mysteries.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Elvis is dead, and so is Starrs' prose, June 28, 2006
James Starrs co-wrote Scientific Evidence in Civil and Criminal Cases, one of the standard single volume reference books in the field. His talents as a memoirist, however, are limited. Voice For The Dead is filled with wooden dialogue and overused metaphors.
Every chapter begins with one or two epigrams, presumably in order to place Starrs' erudition on display. An epigram should serve as a sort of lodestar to guide the reader toward the author's way of thinking. But Starrs trots out some real warhorses, such as, "The evil that men do lives after them,"
from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Countless thousands of English 101 students have used that quote as an epigram for their essays; it tells us nothing special about what Starrs does for a living.
Starrs has a tin ear for dialogue. Even in a clinical discussion, I doubt a forensic scientist would say, in one breath, "...the dead prospectors were all buried in the vicinity of Lake City in spite of a large body of opinion insisting even to this day that they had been interred miles away on the shores of Lake San Cristobel, the terminus of the Gunnison River."
Try saying that, out loud, in a conversational tone.
Starrs tells us about the "legend" about him in his academic circles. He mentions accomplishments outside of forensic science. (Apparently he "bicycled across the breadth of the United States..." Rephrasing it as simply, "bicycled across the United States," would be less redundant, not to mention less florrid.)
Starrs' has failed to notice that the prose style found in 19th century novels doesn't work so well in a 21st professional memoir. Forensic science, since TV's CSI shows became popular, is a topic more people want to read about. But there are other recent books on the subject whose authors seem less self-satisfied about their accomplishments, and more aware that they are writing, not for themselves, but for a 21st century readership.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Please Bury Your Ego, November 6, 2005
It's a dirty subject, and certainly an intriguing one, but what the reader ultimately unearths in this scientific memoir about forensic exhumation is how impressed the author is with his own skill and fame. Starrs describes himself as a man who is, among other things, "audacious," "bold," and "exacting," with "well-established credentials" and a dedication to "risk-taking" and "the greater good." This arrogance is off-putting, as is the author's unedited writing; his style includes redundancies ("pellucidly clear"), cliches ("savor life to its fullest"), floridity ("lest the ravages of time savage my hopes"), and more. Plus, he renders some re-created dialogue in a most awkward manner. Still, if you can slog through his language, the chapters on celebrity disinterments such those of Jesse James and Alfred Packer have some fascinating passages, and the author does convey the occasional bursts of excitement that punctuate his hours and hours of painstaking labor. I do wish he'd added a chapter about his grandfather, a funeral director whose work first inspired his interest in autopsying corpses and excavating graves. Overall, though, I just didn't dig A Voice for the Dead.
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