Authorities began capturing dogs in the park this week after a mother and her infant boy were found dead and covered in dog bites on Dec. 29 and the bodies of a teenage couple were found covered in fatal bites from as many as 10 dogs a week later.
And the lavishly gory descriptions of the operations, on a wounded dog and a technically-dead war-time comrade an epiphanic moment when Givens realises that he wants to become a heart surgeon are not for the faint-hearted.
He gives children ritual pats on the cheek, but reveals his emotional detachment during a 1938 Munich "celebration for dead comrades" when, confronted by a girl convulsed with grief presumably for her dead father he administers a pat that amounts to the kind of whack one would give a playful dog.