MacKinnon is a fine storyteller and his crisp, imaginative writing is well-suited to this somewhat unorthodox detective...
A journalist turns detective in the case of his dead uncle, murdered during the unrest of the Dominican revolution.
MacKinnon (co-author, Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, 2007) delivers a deeply personal investigation into the death of his uncle, Arthur MacKinnon. Best known as “Padre Arturo,” but “Father Art” to the author, the young Catholic priest disappeared into the wilds of the Dominican Republic in 1960 to preach his faith. Five years later, a young soldier named Odulio de los Santos Castillo walked into the town of Monte Plata with an improbable story of shooting the 32-year-old missionary, a second lieutenant named Evangelista Martínez and a constable, Ramón Restituyo, in what was ruled a regrettable accident. Forty years later, the author traveled to this tumultuous country to reconcile the slim truths and embellished myths of his uncle’s murder. Despite a few hastily written diary entries, Padre Arturo never fully emerges in the story, but in tracking down the natives that loved him, MacKinnon says much about the echoes of life and death. The voices that are present in the narrative—ribald priests, unwavering nuns, fearful bureaucrats and enigmatic, paranoid generals—are vivid and reveal the book’s dichotomous nature. Those who knew the victim are elegant in voicing their obvious affection for Arthur and those puppeteers who know more than they admit expose the menacing madness of the republic’s early days. As MacKinnon travels from shrine to graveyard to conduct interviews, the poetry of tragedy and an absurd humor about a crime long past come together to reveal a fascinating history. The author’s conclusions are speculative at best—“It must have happened something like that,” he writes toward the end—but his journey toward some kind of truth is a moving one.
MacKinnon is a fine storyteller and his crisp, imaginative writing is well-suited to this somewhat unorthodox detective story enmeshed in the secret history of the country’s volatile politics.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59558-181-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.
Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Maryland decision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61254-149-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...
The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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