BROWDERBOOKS
The new edition of Fascinating New Yorkers has received two five-star reviews from Readers' Favorite. Excerpts follow.
It is really a pleasure to discover all these personalities one after the other. Fascinating New Yorkers is a book that will appeal to anyone who enjoys an interesting read. -- Five-star review for Readers' Favorite by Astrid Iustulin.
Each character is presented with a sense of familiarity that is not always found in biographical sketches. This makes for an interesting read whether you’re a New Yorker or not. -- Five-star review for Readers' Favorite by Emily-Jane Hills Orford.
Available from Amazon.
KILL
“Be a killer,” Fred Tump told his young son Donald long ago, and Donld has followed his advice ever since.
Not literally, of course. We use the verb “kill” and words related to it rather freely, not meaning to take someone’s life. For instance:
- You kill me. (You’re too much. You’re overdoing it, but I’m not fooled.)
- I’m just killing time.
- He made a killing in the market.
- She’s a real killjoy.
But the verb kill has, in English, a force to it. It’s a monosyllable, short, quick, and clean. Shakespeare knew it, when he had a deranged King Lear exclaim
And when I have stol'n upon these sons-in-law,
Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!
Have I ever killed? Yes, bugs galore. Mosquitoes, flies, roaches, mice. The mice and roaches by using glue traps, the flies with a flyswatter, the mosquitoes with a quick swat by hand. Did I relish these massacres? You bet. We’re all killers at heart, but in different contexts.
I once heard of a young man who, for Christmas, asked his parents for a motorcycle; they said they would see about it. The young man had high expectations. But when Christmas came, his parents apologized, explaining that they just couldn’t afford it. The young man was crushed, then furious. Knowing where his father kept a gun, he got it and shot both parents dead. Then, appalled at what he had done, he rushed to the garage to get in the family car and drive away, to where he didn’t even know. And sitting there in the garage was a shiny new motorcycle. His parents had wanted to surprise him.
This is a true story. The young man fled in the car, but in time he was arrested and sent to prison. He was impulsive and prone to anger, but not a hardened criminal. Yet deep inside him there was a potential killer, waiting for some incident to propel him into action. Do any of us know fully what lies buried deep inside us? Maybe a killer. Scary.
Have I ever seen a killer? Yes, at the Coney Island Aquarium: a shark. It was swimming in a large tank, its sleek, streamlined body supple, its eye evil, its jaws equipped with jagged, in-curved teeth, so that the more a victim struggled, the more it would be impaled on those teeth, rendering escape impossible. An efficient, swift killer, and beautiful. Yes, seen swimming freely, beautiful. But not one to meet in the open sea. Bathers and surfers, watch out. Sharks pop up when and where least expected, with dire results.
Gray nurse shark, Minnesota Zoo
In nature, killing is normal, even necessary. Cats kill birds; do we then hate cats? Once when, on vacation, I was watching a flock of migrating sparrows feeding on some seed that I had put out, a small hawk swooped down and grabbed one of the sparrows, while the others scattered in terror. The hawk — a sparrow hawk, smallest of the falcons — then proceeded to feed on its dead victim. It was nature, it was basic and — in a way — beautiful.
Animals kill because they must eat to survive. To my knowledge, only humans kill for pleasure, for vengeance, out of hatred or ideology or greed. (If there’s an exception, it might be cats, since they play with a captured mouse before killing it.) And yes, sometimes we humans kill in self-defense, which, if true, can be justified.
A messy subject. And when the state executes, it’s really messy. I’ll go into that next time.
© 2021 Clifford Browder
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