Sad and revealing, but less powerful than other prison sagas like Thomas Gaddis’ classic Birdman of Alcatraz or, more...
Digressing from his previous focus on the formative years of Western civilization (The Mysteries of the Middle Ages, 2006, etc.), Cahill gives a personal account of a Texan executed in 2004 for a 1992 murder.
The author, who first visited Dominique Green on death row in 2003, makes no bones about his belief that the case represents a gross miscarriage of justice. He may not convince every reader, given that the murder was committed during an armed robbery Green admitted participating in, the weapon was found in his car and he tried to coerce one of his partners in crime into making up an alibi. Cahill is more effective at demonstrating the inherent flaws in the Texas judicial system as well as the inhumanity of life on death row. Raised by abusive, drug-addicted parents, Green was 18 when he was charged with the fatal shooting of a truck driver outside a Houston convenience store. His court-appointed lawyers were both inexperienced and negligent. Two of his co-defendants later received reduced sentences; the lone white suspect was never charged at all, in return for turning informant. Condemned to death, Green transformed himself into a model prisoner who eventually won the friendship and support of the victim’s family. He was also aided by Sheila Murphy, a former Chicago judge who took up his appeal, and by the Community of Sant’Egidio, an international charity based in Rome. Cahill, recruited to the cause by Murphy, elevated the case’s profile by arranging a prison visit from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who later called Green “a remarkable advertisement for God.” The author clearly demonstrates Green’s spiritual and intellectual growth while a death row inmate, but his subjective approach weakens this slim narrative’s dramatic punch.
Sad and revealing, but less powerful than other prison sagas like Thomas Gaddis’ classic Birdman of Alcatraz or, more recently, John Carlin’s Playing the Enemy.Pub Date: March 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52019-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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BOOK REVIEW
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IN THE NEWS
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
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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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