A disturbing yet necessary, significant book by a journalist willing to place himself in danger.
The bloody history of a violent Bronx-based gang in the middle of the crack epidemic.
Journalist Green (Murder in the High Himalaya: Loyalty, Tragedy, and Escape from Tibet, 2010) initially focuses on the Bronx during the 1980s and ’90s, digging deep to explain how it became infested with gang-related shootings and a massive wave of deadly drug abuse. The author then moves the narrative into the present, explaining why crime has returned to the Bronx in full force after a temporary reduction. Although the saga is populated by a variety of vivid characters, Green emphasizes the importance of winning the trust of two veteran New York City policemen, John O’Malley and Pete Forcelli, and two lifelong Bronx-based criminals with experience inside the gang known as Sex Money Murder. Though the African-American gangsters, Pipe and Suge, felt no reason to trust Green, a white man with a British accent, they reluctantly met with him at the behest of O’Malley and Forcelli, who had helped bring them to justice and then encouraged them to leave their lives of crime. (Pipe mostly succeeded in becoming a law-abiding citizen, while Suge mostly failed.) The author realized the difficulties inherent in verifying much of what he heard from the gang members, and he labored mightily for confirmation by checking court records, police reports, and photographs as well as by interviewing prosecutors and defense lawyers. The bloodiness of the SMM–related crimes, as well as the lack of contrition from Suge, Pipe, and their cohorts, may turn off some readers, but Green’s insights into a culture unavailable to most readers are invaluable. As the author writes, “just north of my Manhattan apartment was a world as dangerous as any I had experienced as a journalist reporting in the favelas of Brazil, the garrisons of Kingston, Jamaica, or the killing fields of Colombia.”
A disturbing yet necessary, significant book by a journalist willing to place himself in danger.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-24448-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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