Readable, appealing true crime with an undercurrent of unease at the violence creeping into so many postindustrial “edge...
Propulsive account of a hard-charging homicide unit in a high-crime Washington, D.C., suburb.
Wilber (Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan, 2011), who covers the Justice Department for the Los Angeles Times, develops a vivid sense of place alongside gritty workaday realities, resulting in a fresh take on the familiar topic of killers and their pursuers. He focuses on Prince George’s County, a sprawling “microcosm of the new America” that conceals startling murder rates, even during the chilly February of 2013, when the detectives he shadowed felt “there was simply too much pent-up violence on the streets, and it needed an outlet.” The resulting 12 murders included gang sprees, home invasions, drug-conspiracy killings, and predatory robberies. The rash of violence fully taxed the 25 detectives whom Wilber profiles, a diverse, eccentric, yet accomplished array who can be “like cut-ups in high-school biology class”—notwithstanding their grisly surroundings and the challenge of investigation, equal parts forensic precision, bureaucratic documentation, and Kafka-esque conversations with criminal prevaricators. Such interviews with suspects make up several tense stretches, where “for the most part, the suspect deflects and evades” while still giving away insights to their interrogators (and Wilber). In a narrative light on technical and tactical aspects of policing, the author focuses on environmental and tactile details, humanizing his detectives and a supporting cast of victims, survivors, and perpetrators. Many murder victims are entrenched in the regional underground of drug dealing and serial crime, making the detectives jaded and the investigations a slog; contrastingly, the detectives work furiously to solve the vicious killings of a teenage honor student and an elderly woman. Regarding these cases involving innocent victims, one veteran detective exclaims, “We are going old-school here.” Wilber embedded with the unit for several months, until his “narrative architecture” suggested itself; this immersive approach allows him to capture the cops’ inner monologues and their prickly exchanges with criminals and one another with effective clarity.
Readable, appealing true crime with an undercurrent of unease at the violence creeping into so many postindustrial “edge city” communities.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9881-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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