Wambaugh's darkest nonfiction since The Onion Field: a sleek and steadily gripping chronicle of the rape/murder of two English girls and of the relentless manhunt for the killer, finally nabbed through the nascent technique of genetic fingerprinting. When pretty teen-ager Lynda Mann is found raped/strangled in November 1983 in the quiet English village of Narborough, police from the nearby county seat of Leicester mount a massive investigation. Led by bristly Inspector Derek Pearce, the 150-man murder squad follows up scores of leads, but a year later no probable suspect is in hand and the probe grinds to a halt. In July 1986, however, the killer strikes again—this time raping and strangling teen-ager Dawn Ashworth only a stone's throw from where he murdered Lynda. Moreover, this time the killer is apparently seen—and soon a churlish, slow-witted local boy, a kitchen porter, is confessing, albeit confusedly, to the killings. Meanwhile, however, British scientist Alec Jeffreys has devised a revolutionary new forensics technique whereby each person's unique (except for identical twins) DNA can be mapped into a distinct visual pattern. For the first time ever in a criminal case, Jeffrey's technique is applied, comparing the kitchen porter's blood with semen found on the two dead girls—and the shocker is that the DNA of the samples don't match: the kitchen porter is not the killer. Back to square one, Pearce and his men begin the greatest round-up in British crime annals, testing the DNA of the blood of over 4,000 men: Will the cops' biochemical net haul in the murderous sociopath who surely lurks in Narborough or one of its neighboring towns? A meticulous and suspenseful reconstruction that exchanges the sardonic humor of Wambaugh's recent work (The Secrets of Harry Bright, 1985; Echoes in the Darkness, 1987) for moralistic deep-delving into the suffering of the victims' families, the affectless sociopathy of the killer, and the gritty determination of the cops. A powerful and elegant police procedural.
Pub Date: Feb. 16, 1988
ISBN: 055376330X
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1988
IN THE NEWS
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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