A captivating, emotionally intense investigation of the complicated relationship between truth and the justice system.
Criminal-defense attorney Smith (Law/Georgetown Univ.) describes her attempt to liberate a wrongfully imprisoned woman.
The author was a second-year law student in 1980 when she met convicted felon Kelly Jarrett under the auspices of New York University’s free Prison Law Clinic. Smith’s narrative portrays a sweet Southern girl ensnared by the New York penal system. North Carolina native Kelly was 21 in August 1973, when she took a trip to Utica, N.Y., with gay buddy Billy Ronald, whom she let use her car while she was dallying with a new girlfriend. Naïve, unsuspecting Kelly had no idea that Billy Ronald was a career criminal, she subsequently told her lawyers. Two and a half years later, she was arrested after an eyewitness positively identified Kelly as present at the scene of the robbery and brutal murder of a teenaged gas-station attendant in Utica. Offered a reduced sentence if she pleaded guilty to robbery, Kelly staunchly insisted on her innocence and refused; she was convicted as an accomplice to murder and got life in prison. The author worked on Kelly’s appeal while at the Prison Law Clinic, but lost touch after graduating. In 1993, now a full-fledged public defender, Smith met Jean Harris, who had been serving 12 years for murder in the same jail as Kelly and urged the lawyer to contact her former client. After their reunion, Smith became an amazingly tireless advocate, making it her personal mission to free Kelly via executive clemency. Her dense narrative weaves Kelly’s plight with theories on innocence and “the truth,” case studies, a discussion of the significance of criminal defenders and an examination of the various ethical dilemmas they face. Kelly’s case was one of many criminal convictions contingent upon a “single, shaky eyewitness,” she reminds us; new policies have since been drafted to lessen the likelihood of false identifications. Kelly was finally released in 2005, after 28 years, six months, in jail.
A captivating, emotionally intense investigation of the complicated relationship between truth and the justice system.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-230-60528-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.
A compelling, profoundly unsettling blend of memoir and manifesto that proposes that—by design—matters will never improve for African Americans.
To be black, writes Wilderson III, who chairs the African American Studies program at the University of California, Irvine, is not just likely to descend from slaves, but to be forever condemned to the existential condition of a slave. As he writes, “slavery did not end in 1865. It is a relational dynamic…[that] can continue to exist once the settler has left or ceded governmental power.” No other ethnic group—not Native Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, or Hispanic Americans—in the U.S. suffers the same institutional violence, and, Wilderson suggests, all others are more structurally aligned with the white oppressor than with the oppressed African American in a system that hinges on violence. Blending affecting memoir that touches on such matters as mental illness, alienation, exile, and a transcendent maternal love with brittle condemnation of a condition of unfreedom and relentless othering, the author delivers a difficult but necessary argument. It is difficult because it demands that readers of any ethnicity confront hard truths and also because it is densely written, with thickets of postmodern tropes to work through (“blackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whim…a disfigured and disfiguring phobic phenomenon”). The book is deeply pessimistic indeed, as Wilderson rejects any possibility of racial reconciliation in these two-steps-backward times. Perhaps the greatest value of the book is in its posing of questions that may seem rhetorical but in fact probe at interethnic conflicts that are hundreds, even thousands of years old. Wilderson advances a growing body of theory that must be reckoned with and that “has secured a mandate from Black people at their best; which is to say, a mandate to speak the analysis and rage that most Black people are free only to whisper.”
An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-614-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A gargantuan but surprisingly agile and spellbinding biography of the plain-speaking, plain-dealing Man from Missouri. As depicted by McCullough (Brave Companions, 1991, etc.), Truman, though the first President of the nuclear era, was fundamentally a throwback to 19th-century midwestern ideals of honesty. Like the young Teddy Roosevelt in the author's Mornings on Horseback (1981), the pre-Presidential Truman most impresses McCullough as a battler against overwhelming odds: the failed farmer and haberdasher; the WW I captain who kept his unit together under deadly fire; and the scorned product of the Kansas City machine who won Senate colleagues' respect by chairing an investigation into WW II defense spending and winning a ferocious primary contest. With the stage thus set, the narrative picks up whirlwind force, following Truman from his assumption of the Presidency upon FDR's death—when "the sun, the moon, and the stars" seemed ready to fall on him—through the decisions to drop the atomic bomb; confront Stalin at Potsdam; send troops to Korea (the most important decision of his Presidency, Truman felt); and fire MacArthur. The book's main event, however, is the legendary "Whistle-Stop Campaign" of 1948, when Truman puffed off the political upset of the century. Readers jaded by Vietnam and Watergate may ask: Could any President be this serene, honest, and courageous? Yet McCullough weaves his spell, convincingly limning a politician who didn't lie, steal, pay attention to pollsters or pundits, or quail in the face of diplomatic or political combat (his major fault seems to have been excessive loyalty to cronies who betrayed his trust). Truman apparently really was, as his Secretary of State Dean Acheson said, the "captain with the mighty heart." Rich in detail, enthralling, and moving: a classic Presidential biography.
Pub Date: June 19, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-45654-7
Page Count: 1120
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
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