A slap-in-the-face look at the criminal-justice system.
Three nasty criminal cases provide a long-serving trial deputy in the Los Angeles DA’s office with the chance to nimbly explain what really goes on in a courtroom.
Batt has put in 25 years as a deputy district attorney in LA, working everything from hot prowl to mayhem, robbery to murder. She tenders here some fruits of her hard-won experience as illustrated by three exceptional crimes she prosecuted: an all-night crime spree that included rape and robbery; a violent gay rape; and a vicious assault by a respectable citizen who claimed to be cleaning up the Hollywood streets. Concise, blow-by-blow recountings deliver both wicked circumstantial color (“They might have gotten away with the whole thing if they had just stopped after the raping, pillaging, and burning”) and, importantly, the meat of the prosecutorial process: Will the jury empathize with your witness or victim? When is a plea bargain likely? What about the inherent conflict of interest in multiple-defendant cases? Who is a good juror? Questions of due diligence and preparation also arise, and the author imparts telling details, e.g., that a greasy lunch can compromise jurors’ attention to an afternoon opening statement. Always, Batt is concerned with the process of law: “Failure to provide prompt and thorough discovery to the defense is unethical,” she notes, “and can result in a variety of sanctions.” Yet she is also attuned to the nuances of the courtroom, realizing that one judge’s homophobia compromised her case, and getting a surreal, creepy glimpse into the mind of another supposedly objective justice, who orders her to do something about her hair: “It’s too curly. I mean, for God's sake, you have these little golden-brown ringlets all over your head . . . it's simply too—uh—too distracting.” Though Batt is a prosecutor, her 25 rules for giving effective testimony could be used by either side.
A slap-in-the-face look at the criminal-justice system.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-55970-705-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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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