Taylor illuminates in graphic detail the scars caused by some of the worst elements of law enforcement in a city perpetually...
A founding partner of the Chicago-based People’s Law Office recounts his career fighting on behalf of victims of police malfeasance, especially torture and wrongful death.
“If the torture machine teaches one lesson above all, it is that torture is as American as apple pie,” writes Taylor, whose long career is a catalog of hard-fought battles for racial justice waged in Chicago’s courtrooms. In this personal narrative, Taylor offers no introductions or preludes, plunging straight into the heart of the beast: a morass of police corruption and conspiracy dating back to the December 1969 assassinations of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Discussing his arrival on the scene of what authorities were selling as a police raid gone wrong, the author writes, “shock and grief soon met with the dawning realization that the police claims of a shootout were bold-faced lies. We were looking at a murder scene.” Thus begins the harrowing tale of the author’s 13-year crusade with the PLO “to uncover and expose the truth about that murderous raid.” The author also chronicles the next three decades spent seeking justice for survivors of a conspiracy of brutal torture carried out by police during their investigations. Sparing no details, Taylor reveals the police force’s reign of terror and the Gestapo-like interrogation tactics administered by Lt. Jon Burge and his squad of “confederates.” For 20 years, using a variety of tactics, including suffocation, pistol-whipping, and electric shock—all under a cloak of secrecy—Burge and company beat confessions from dozens of victims. The author uncovers stories of secret files, a code of silence among police officers, and complicity among politicians, and he shows how he and the PLO worked for years to free prisoners whose incarcerations were based on torture confessions while winning “more than $35,000,000 in settlements, verdicts, and reparations for more than sixty torture survivors.”
Taylor illuminates in graphic detail the scars caused by some of the worst elements of law enforcement in a city perpetually beset by violence.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60846-895-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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