A terrible personal case that brings general conditions into cruelly sharp focus.
A shocking tale of wrongful conviction and an argument for “a more responsive, sensitive, humane, and just legal system.”
In 1983, Logan was sentenced to a life term, without parole, for a murder he did not commit. With journalist Falbaum, he tells how the murderer’s lawyers’ commitment to protect their client’s confidentiality kept him in jail for 26 years. Two public defenders, Dale Coventry and William Kunz, were in possession of evidence of Logan’s innocence from the beginning. They represented Andrew “Gino” Wilson, who was already in custody for murdering two Chicago police officers. Wilson confessed to them that he had also killed the security guard that Logan was convicted of murdering. Wilson repeatedly refused to free his defenders from their obligations to him under the legal system’s code of ethics. The lawyers crafted an affidavit testifying to their knowledge and locked it away until Wilson’s death in 2007 freed them from their obligation. Logan’s tribulations involve much more than the concealment of the real murderer’s confession. He had been framed by a unit of the Chicago police under the leadership of Jon Burge, who was later accused of torturing more than 200 suspects between 1972 and 1991. Dismissed from the police, Burge was eventually convicted of perjury and sentenced in 2010 to four years in jail. Even with the revelation of the affidavit, Logan’s lawyers still had to rebut the original prosecutor’s case and also reverse decisions made in earlier attempts at appeal. The suit, which ultimately prevailed and secured Logan’s freedom, proved that “there was never any physical evidence tying me to the crime.” Furthermore, exculpatory evidence—a gun owned by Wilson—was known to police but not disclosed, and police failed to reveal that Wilson told a friend about the murder. Evidence was made up, and witnesses whose evidence was helpful to Logan were not called.
A terrible personal case that brings general conditions into cruelly sharp focus.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-992-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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