Both charming and disturbing, Halber’s accessible, personalized style is engaging despite being somewhat at odds with the...
Account of the eccentric online communities that have transformed the forensic identification of deceased missing persons.
“Chances are good that you or someone you know has at one point stumbled over a dead body,” writes Boston-based science writer Halber in this passionately rendered debut. “America is home to tens of thousands of unidentified human remains.” Using a number of infamous unsolved crimes as a framework—including such regional legends as Kentucky’s “Tent Girl” and Provincetown’s “Lady of the Dunes”—the author argues that, despite our cultural fondness for crime stories and pursuit of perpetrators, it remains shockingly easy for a dead body to remain unidentified and thus disappeared, whether through natural or malicious intervention. Until recently, law enforcement was often ineffective in managing UIDs, given that such cases often crossed state lines as well as the technical complexities of handling decomposed remains. This began to change in 2004, when Justice Department studies found alarming numbers of unidentified remains in many jurisdictions; at the same time, many amateurs had begun to connect, share information and provide tips on cold cases via the Internet. Halber recounts her interviews with several of these cold-case enthusiasts, a diverse group ranging from a Massachusetts police dispatcher to a self-described “Southern version of Kojak” whose identification of Tent Girl after 40 years led to a full-time career. Since then, amateur interest in such unsolved cases has expanded: Halber notes that crowd-sourced discussion boards like Cold Cases and the Doe Network evolved spontaneously, taking advantage of information secreted in the Web’s dark corners, yet often wound up becoming competitive and catty. Although law enforcement used to resist such outsider involvement, many officials now recognize the benefits of the homegrown sleuths’ efforts.
Both charming and disturbing, Halber’s accessible, personalized style is engaging despite being somewhat at odds with the grisly aspects of her topic.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5758-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior 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
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A powerful voice on behalf of young people who should not be stigmatized but need support from schools and communities to...
An unvarnished account of one woman's painful “journey from victim to survivor,” as she came to understand the “dynamics of commercial sexual exploitation, especially child sex trafficking.”
In this debut, Smith, a public advocate for trafficking victims, begins in 1992 with her own experience. At the age of 14, she was briefly a prostitute before being rescued by the police. Since she was manipulated rather than subjected to violence, she was shamed by the false belief that she had chosen to be a prostitute. Only in 2009, three years after her marriage, did she feel able to reveal her story and give testimony before Congress. She blames the media for objectifying sexuality and creating an environment in which an estimated 100,000 in the U.S. are victimized annually. Smith describes how one afternoon, she was walking through the mall when a young man approached her. They flirted briefly, and he slipped her his phone number, asking her to get in touch. She describes her vulnerability to his approach. She was socially insecure. Both of her parents were alcoholics, and before the age of 10, she had been repeatedly abused sexually by a cousin. In her eagerness to have a boyfriend, she responded to his come-on and agreed to a meeting. As it turned out, he was profiling her for a pimp, and it was the pimp who met her—accompanied by a prostitute, there to show her the ropes. Their approach was nonthreatening, and they suggested that, in the future, she might have a career in modeling. Many unhappy children, writes the author, “are lured into trusting their traffickers” due to their lack of self-esteem. In the aftermath of the experience, although she finished college and had a successful career, Smith struggled with depression and substance abuse.
A powerful voice on behalf of young people who should not be stigmatized but need support from schools and communities to protect them from predators.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-137-27873-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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