A bleak but thoughtful look at the curse of urban violence, both its causalities and its long-term effects.
A shocking tale of a mistaken-identity multiple murder and its aftermath.
Retired NFL All-Pro cornerback Alexander’s life story would be compelling on its own merits, without the disturbing tragedy at the center of this memoir. In 1984, as crack and gangs were overwhelming South Central Los Angeles, gunmen invaded the home of Alexander’s mother, killing her, Alexander’s sister, and two boys. Beyond his own anguish, the author notes how the crime’s “extreme nature shocked even the calloused inhabitants of South Central.” Although Alexander contemplated a vigilante hunt for the perpetrators, the investigation soon pinpointed several members of the Rolling Sixties gang, one of whom passed a note to a co-defendant following their arrest that was practically a confession. With three gangsters convicted and two sentenced to death, Alexander was left to brood on the case’s unanswered questions; supposedly, the killers were hired to attack the plaintiff in a lawsuit stemming from a bar brawl, yet they went to the wrong house. “Every detail had to align, fall just so, to produce this tragedy,” writes the author. While co-authors Gerould and Snipes (Criminal Justice/San Francisco State Univ.) bring an authoritative voice to the story’s legal and investigative aspects, Alexander lends gravity to his tale of personal tragedy by looking for broader narratives. He dramatizes his family history, noting that his parents’ generation fled Jim Crow for a middle-class life in LA, a promise eroded by segregation and crime. While castigating South Central’s gang culture for its nihilistic violence, he also notes its historical roots in racist “street terrorism, in addition to the governmental tactic of restrictive housing covenants.” Despite his anger, Alexander shows remarkable empathy by investigating the killers’ forsaken childhoods and lives in prison. Finally, observing, “I had gone from professional athlete to professional victim,” the author concludes by discussing his adoption of five Haitian orphans, a difficult ordeal with a more positive outcome.
A bleak but thoughtful look at the curse of urban violence, both its causalities and its long-term effects.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6576-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
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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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