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EXECUTING JUSTICE

Name: EXECUTING JUSTICE
Author: Daniel R. Williams
ISBN: 0-312-27666-4

AN INSIDE ACCOUNT OF THE CASE OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL

by Daniel R. Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

A readable and highly provocative addition to a furious debate.

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An insider’s account of one of the most controversial legal proceedings in modern American history.

Just before 4:00 a.m. on the morning of December 9, 1981, Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner was shot and killed after having made a traffic stop. When other officers arrived on the scene, they found the well-known radical African-American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal sitting on a curb next to the apparent murder weapon. Although he denied the crime, Mumia was brought to trial and convicted. His attorneys appealed, arguing that the first trial did not consider key evidence that would have proved his innocence. That appeal was unsuccessful, and Mumia has lived on Death Row for the past 18 years. First-time author Williams, a gifted writer and chronicler as well as an evidently capable attorney, joined Mumia’s defense team a decade ago and has since led the effort to secure his client a retrial. The basis for that demand is multifaceted, and Williams explores each reason in considerable but never tedious detail. He asserts, for instance, that the lack of pathology reports in the original trial compromised Mumia’s defense, and that the government’s witnesses were a dodgy and eminently impeachable lot (one eyewitness, for example, was a prostitute who may have escaped arrest by testifying as police investigators wanted her to). More than arguing for Mumia’s innocence against what he admits is strong evidence to the contrary (and even dismissing as absurd some arguments as to why Mumia could not have committed the crime), Williams considers the trial in the light of a long history of injustices against African-Americans in Philadelphia, and especially against those African-Americans who, like Mumia, have publicly denounced police and judicial corruption. The trial, he concludes, points to the profound divisions along lines of race and class that trouble American society—and to the selective nature of justice that obtains here.

A readable and highly provocative addition to a furious debate.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-312-27666-4

Page Count: 416

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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Awards & Accolades

Likes

21

Our Verdict

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Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015

Kirkus Prize
winner

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Award Winner

Pulitzer Prize Finalist

The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.