Alternately poignant, powerful and ponderous—a worthwhile glimpse into a battered culture.
Australian novelist Hooper (A Child’s Book of True Crime, 2002) investigates the 2004 death of an Aboriginal man and the subsequent trial of the police sergeant charged with his killing.
The author combines murder mystery with provocative social commentary in her deeply felt if occasionally overwrought account. Pursuing the story from ground level, Hooper traveled to remote Aboriginal townships to explore a culture rich in folklore and superstition and a population seemingly condemned to poverty, squalor and hopelessness. She was less successful in penetrating the stone-faced veneer of accused detective Chris Hurley, whose career included episodes of both brutality and kindness. Absent Hurley’s cooperation, Hooper was left to speculate on the mindset of this particular “tall man” and a police force highly adept at protecting its own. More revelatory was the author’s emotional journey into the lives of Australia’s indigenous people, crippled both by the effects of long-standing white domination and by their own self-destructive behavior. (Laudably, Hooper doesn’t scant either aspect in her text.) The victim, Cameron Doomadgee, was sadly typical of many young Aboriginal men living in the remote Queensland hamlet of Palm Island. Impoverished, unemployed and chronically drunk, he encountered Hurley after a morning of heavy imbibing. The Aboriginal shouted a slur, the cop arrested him, and things escalated from there. When Doomadgee punched the nearly 6’7” sergeant outside the police station, a scuffle ensued. Hurley claimed that he simply fell on top of his prisoner during the ruckus, but an autopsy revealed that the 36-year-old Aboriginal suffered severe trauma to his midsection that nearly ruptured his liver in half. An ambitious career officer with a record of good relations with Aborigines (he had even created a sports club for Aboriginal youths), Hurley soon became the first policeman in Australian history formally charged with the death of a prisoner in custody.
Alternately poignant, powerful and ponderous—a worthwhile glimpse into a battered culture.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6159-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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