A compelling tale that hits some snags but reveals an exotic world based in greed, violence, and the need for...
A thorough report on the investigation of the drive-by shooting of one of rap music’s top stars.
On March 9, 1997, Christopher Wallace, alias Biggie Smalls and The Notorious B.I.G., left a party at the Soul Train Music Awards in Los Angeles. Within moments, a car pulled up next to his and a well-dressed black man gunned him down and disappeared. Only six months earlier in Las Vegas, rival rapper Tupac Shakur had met a similar demise. In both cases, there were no clear suspects: the black community said that the police weren’t trying, and the police claimed that the witnesses weren’t cooperating. Journalist Scott (The Killing of Tupac Shakur, not reviewed) examines the speculation that the two violent deaths arose from a bicoastal rap feud. She went into the “gangsta” worlds of these celebrities in both New York and Los Angeles to interview people who knew them. At one time, the two men had been friends, but jealousy and media hype stirred up trouble between them—and yet there was clearly something more at stake. Between 1995 and 1998 nine men who were loosely associated with Smalls and Shakur were killed, including the only willing witness to Shakur’s murder (shot in the face, execution-style, just before his scheduled interrogation). Theories about who was behind these high-profile killings ranged from rival record producers to cops to gangs: there was even talk that Smalls was not the intended target. The identity of the killer remains unclear to this day (unless Scott’s lengthy detour into the misadventures of Puffy Combs is a hint).
A compelling tale that hits some snags but reveals an exotic world based in greed, violence, and the need for self-expression.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26620-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
A dispiriting history of transgenerational violence and its victims, by a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist. The Bosket family has lived in the US for as long as there has been an American nation, first as slaves in a quiet corner of South Carolina, now as prisoners of a New York slum. New York Times writer Butterfield (China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, 1982) met one of the family, Willie James Bosketconsidered to be the most violent criminal in New York state history and dubbed ``Hannibal Lecter'' by his guards-while reporting on New York prisons. Struck by Bosket's quick intelligence and finely wrought stories of the world behind bars, Butterfield set out to study the patterns of life that brought him there. What he found, he tells us, is that ``violence is not, as many people today presume, a recent problem or a particularly urban bane. . . . Rather, it grew out of a proud culture that flourished in the antebellum rural South, a tradition shaped by whites long before it was adopted and recast by some blacks in reaction to their plight.'' In Bosket's case, as in that of his father, and his father before him, vicious crime, jail, and violent death served as a coat of arms, with the pattern repeated generation after generation, and with seemingly no way out of the cycle. Butterfield pays too little attention to the environmental causes of violence, but his book lends considerable credence to what historians and sociologists have long suspected: that the long legacy of violence in America is an integral part of our culture, and nothing seems capable of dismantling it. This book, scary and profound, is one of the most urgent of the season, and it demands much discussion.
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-58286-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
A personally and politically authoritative inquiry into modern war crimes. Allen (Comparative Literature/Syracuse Univ.) describes and analyzes three kinds of genocidal rape practiced by the Serb forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. First, soldiers brutally rape women in public, returning several days later to guarantee safe passsage for the terrified villagers only if they promise never to return. Second, persons held in concentration camps are repeatedly raped and often killed. Finally, soldiers repeatedly rape women until they become pregnant. The acts of rape continue until late enough in the pregnancy to preclude a safe abortion. The women are then released, eventually to give birth to a Serb child. Using accounts of camp survivors and those who work to help them, Allen chooses to bypass ``proper scholarly standards of source documentation'' in order to ensure the safety of her informants and future survivors of genocidal rape. Allen concentrates on genocidal rape as it takes form in impregnating women, since this particular form of genocide is unprecedented. Further, according to Allen, it is a logically flawed system of genocide, ``possible only because the policy's authors erase all identity characteristics of the mother other than that as a sexual container.'' Allen attempts to locate genocidal rape in the legal text of international war crimes, but concludes that current conceptions are not sufficient to guarantee justice against such acts. Alternatively, she suggests such violence should be prosecuted as biological warfare, because the crime requires the perpetrator to be biologically male and the victim a biological female capable of conceiving a child. Throughout, Allen reminds the reader that her primary goal with providing evidence of genocidal rape is to stop the violence, and she calls everyone to action to end the aggression. Allen provides a general and informative map to decoding ethnic relations and a specific and essential outline of genocidal rape.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8166-2818-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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