Poignant and humane.
A compelling account of the life of Troy Davis (1968–2011), the Georgia-born black man condemned to death for the killing of a white policeman.
When Officer Mark MacPhail was brutally gunned down in August 1989, the city of Savannah “was out for blood.” The man apprehended for that shooting, Davis, proclaimed his innocence until the day of his death in September 2011. Documentarian Marlowe (co-author: The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian's Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker, 2011) tells the moving story of Davis and his activist sister, Martina Davis-Correia. Born just 17 months apart, they were as close as “two peas in a pod.” After neighborhood associates—some of whom spoke under duress from the Savannah police—pinned the crime on Davis, Davis-Correia vowed to fight on behalf of her brother. Through multiple appeals and stays of execution that took place over 22 grueling years, never once did her faith in her brother’s innocence waver. It only grew stronger, especially after the associates who blamed her brother for MacPhail’s death eventually retracted their statements regarding Davis’ involvement in the murder and admitted that they had lied under oath. Correia did not fare as well, developing breast cancer. Nevertheless, the two siblings remained committed to each other. Davis became a beloved surrogate father to his sister’s son and inspired him to work “against inequality and injustice,” while Correia worked tirelessly for her brother’s freedom. The state of Georgia finally executed Davis by lethal injection. Two months later, Correia passed away. Marlowe became involved with the case in 2008 and recounts events with compassion for both the Davises and the MacPhails, who declined to participate in the writing of her book. The result is a powerful narrative that challenges the notion that “the taking of one life can be answered by the taking of another.”
Poignant and humane.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60846-294-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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