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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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