An honorably dispassionate and logical broadside against a shameful practice.
The death penalty is wrong because it can’t be meted out fairly, argues Dow (Law/Univ. of Houston).
The standard argument against executions is that they are cruel, inhumane and somehow uncivilized: a rhetorical strategy that often runs aground on the hard retort that killers can’t be punished enough and to feel sympathy for them is naïve at best. Some death penalty abolitionists, like Sister Helen Prejean, will explain why certain death row inmates are actually innocent, but even though the author is director of the Texas Innocence Network, he thinks that’s also the wrong angle to take. Dow systematically walks readers through the process by which states decide to execute criminals, a process that ultimately owes far more to a convict’s race, class and caliber of attorney than to the crime’s level of brutality, which is supposed to be the factor that determines whether a death penalty or life sentence is imposed. “The tiny handful that we execute is almost never the worst of the worst,” writes Dow. “Instead, people are executed because eyewitnesses make mistakes, police lie, defense lawyers sleep, and judges do not care.” He returns repeatedly to the subject of defense lawyers who slept through the trials of clients who later went to death row; in one unbelievable instance in Texas, six people who had been represented by one dozing lawyer were executed. It isn’t just a bad defense that makes the system so unfair to the accused, the author asserts; it’s also the simple fact that minorities are executed far more often than their white counterparts (regardless of the severity of the crime) and that higher courts are increasingly unwilling to hear appeals from those on death row. Though the central power of Dow’s argument occasionally gets lost in a book that frequently reads like a dry legal brief, he succeeds in illuminating the horrific arbitrariness of a system that has abandoned blind justice for “the rule of the mob.”
An honorably dispassionate and logical broadside against a shameful practice.Pub Date: May 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-8070-4420-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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