A stark reminder not just of the actions of a group of idealistic activists but of the violence and turmoil of the nation’s...
Civil-rights historian Dittmer (History/DePauw Univ.; Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, 1994) focuses on one of the lesser-known groups involved in the struggle.
The author acknowledges that his coverage of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in the Bancroft Prize–winning Local People was inadequate. Here he tells the full story of this activist health-care organization, linking its aims and accomplishments with larger struggles. The MCHR, founded by left-wing, white, mostly Jewish doctors and joined by African-Americans, had a dual mission—to provide medical care for civil-rights workers in Mississippi during Freedom Summer (1964) and to reform the South’s Jim Crow health-care system. Dittmer reveals the motivations of many of the organization’s leaders, and he paints a disturbing picture of the shameful treatment of both black doctors and patients in the South. In the early chapters he writes vividly of the challenges facing civil-rights workers and of the brutality—beatings, jailings, killings—inflicted on them. The narrative pace slows when the author shifts attention to the political controversies and internal ideological disputes that led to the group’s decline. Dittmer documents the disintegration of the MCHR following the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the rise of the black-militant movement. Northern white liberals began to question their role in the organization, and a rift was growing between those who saw it as the medical arm of the civil-rights movement and those who believed its mission should be to address the health-care needs of all poor people, regardless of race. By the late ’60s the MCHR had become a cash-strapped loose federation of largely independent local chapters. The author argues that it should be remembered for its role in desegregating Southern hospitals and medical societies, creating comprehensive community-health centers, shaping health-care legislation and providing a model for subsequent activist health organizations, such as Partners in Health.
A stark reminder not just of the actions of a group of idealistic activists but of the violence and turmoil of the nation’s not-so-distant past.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59691-567-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Detroit's story of an undercover sting operation into the Hell's Angels is quick and breezy but insults the reader with its sketchy rendering of a fascinating scenario. One can sympathize with Detroit (a pseudonymous screenwriter), whose account of a police infiltration of the notorious biker gang, naturally invites comparisons with Hunter S. Thompson's authoritative tale. This sparse made-for-TV product pales next to Thompson's searing depictions of life with the Angels. One day in 1977, Orange County police detective Victoria Seele (Detroit uses fictional names throughout the book) accepts an assignment to ride on the back of Clifford Mowery's Harley-Davidson. Mowery, a hardscrabble biker and convict with a long rap sheet, grudgingly offers to serve as an informant in order to stay out of jail. For eight months, the two crisscross Southern California making undercover drug buys from motorcycle-gang members. Seele, with her surfer looks, awkwardly survives parties at which she is the only one not using drugs and not wearing the typical biker garb (denim vest, waist chains, and strap-on buck knife). During one particularly vulgar Angels party, Seele nearly jumps into bed with two other women in order not to blow her cover. Detroit sprays his text with scare phrases, telling us, in case we haven't caught on, that these people are dangerous, and here Seele is risking her life. Occasionally, we are given glimpses into Seele's supposedly deteriorating home life, but like the rest of the details here, these scenes lack the power necessary to instill even a meager visceral attachment to the characters. The pieces (and sources) for a spectacular story are here: leather-clad bikers, courageous cops, and a backdrop of Southern California's sleaziest bars and dustiest back roads. But for all its drama, this is, in the end, forgettable. (Literary Guild selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93671-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
An insider peep into the New YorkNew Jersey crime networks. With the help of Wagman (The Nazi Hunters, not reviewed), former wiseguy Fresolone begins his gritty confessions of life as a mobster with the hair-raising scene of his own induction ceremony into the Bruno crime family. Fresolone is already working for the Feds and has strapped to his body more than one tape recorder. It is to be the first-ever taping of a Mafia initiation ceremony- -complete with the blood-letting from the initiate's finger. In the old days, Fresolone laments, they used to mop up the blood with fragments of a saint's picture; now they ``make do'' with tissue paper. The Mob was everything the young Fresolone hoped for growing up in the Down Neck section of Newark. Down Neck was controlled by the powerful Bruno family based in Philadelphia, run nominally by the ``reluctant don'' Angelo Bruno, a mild and compromising kind of man. The real power, though, was the fearsome Tony Bananas, with ``Patty Specs,'' i.e. Pasquale Martirano, as his underboss. After Bananas had Bruno assassinated, he assumed control of the Bruno family enterprise and became our hero's employer. The relation was a tense one. In the end, Fresolone seems to have felt intense personal loyalty only to Specs, a man already dying of liver cancer. Fresolone points out that interfamily murder and strife is comparatively rare these days. It is, rather, internal family violence that is the current curse of Mob hierarchies and that seems to have most affected Fresolone. Eventually, his collaboration with the Feds brought in almost 40 major Mob figures, a fact of which he seems genuinely proud, as if it is a just retribution for what he sees as the Mafia's betrayal of its own principles of loyalty and honor. Not a prose masterpiece, but the genuine article as far as Mob documents go. With its personal touch and its relentless detail, it's a solidly alarming read.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-77905-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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