An unsettling yet important historical excavation and true-crime narrative.
A compact, jolting, account of the shameful execution of a 14-year-old Black boy in the Jim Crow South.
Beyond the riveting narrative, this book has a poignant backstory: Faber pursued it as both academic study and passion project, ultimately racing a cancer diagnosis to complete it. Before his death in 2020, he tasked colleague and friend Carol Berkin with shepherding it to publication. “I knew Eli had been right,” writes Berkin in the foreword. “I had in my keeping an important story that needed to be shared.” The story of George Junius Stinney Jr., convicted of murdering two young girls in a South Carolina mill town, is puzzling and tragic. “Bitter memories of this double murder and the execution that followed…endured for decades,” not least because a desultory investigation and arguably coerced confession leave open the question of culpability. Faber develops the story meticulously, with rewarding detours into the odd “company town” of Alcolu, where a sternly benevolent founding family dominated life, encouraging relatively benign treatment of Black citizens prior to the murder; and the horrific role of lynching as social control in the South. Recalling a memory from Stinney’s brother, the author writes that “until things unraveled after the murder of two White girls, overt tension between the races did not exist.” When the girls were found murdered, a state constable received a tip from an unnamed “colored man” that George Stinney was “the meanest” boy in the town. Although he’d been in sight of family members the whole day, Stinney’s guilt was quickly presumed. As people heard about his purported confession, “rumors of rape quickly destroyed the relative civility between the races that had long defined Alcolu.” A lynching was narrowly averted. Faber ably documents Stinney’s perfunctory trial and quick march toward execution, giving a rich sense of the daily, pervasive brutality of the Jim Crow South.
An unsettling yet important historical excavation and true-crime narrative.Pub Date: June 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64336-194-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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