A bleak but thoughtful look at the curse of urban violence, both its causalities and its long-term effects.
A shocking tale of a mistaken-identity multiple murder and its aftermath.
Retired NFL All-Pro cornerback Alexander’s life story would be compelling on its own merits, without the disturbing tragedy at the center of this memoir. In 1984, as crack and gangs were overwhelming South Central Los Angeles, gunmen invaded the home of Alexander’s mother, killing her, Alexander’s sister, and two boys. Beyond his own anguish, the author notes how the crime’s “extreme nature shocked even the calloused inhabitants of South Central.” Although Alexander contemplated a vigilante hunt for the perpetrators, the investigation soon pinpointed several members of the Rolling Sixties gang, one of whom passed a note to a co-defendant following their arrest that was practically a confession. With three gangsters convicted and two sentenced to death, Alexander was left to brood on the case’s unanswered questions; supposedly, the killers were hired to attack the plaintiff in a lawsuit stemming from a bar brawl, yet they went to the wrong house. “Every detail had to align, fall just so, to produce this tragedy,” writes the author. While co-authors Gerould and Snipes (Criminal Justice/San Francisco State Univ.) bring an authoritative voice to the story’s legal and investigative aspects, Alexander lends gravity to his tale of personal tragedy by looking for broader narratives. He dramatizes his family history, noting that his parents’ generation fled Jim Crow for a middle-class life in LA, a promise eroded by segregation and crime. While castigating South Central’s gang culture for its nihilistic violence, he also notes its historical roots in racist “street terrorism, in addition to the governmental tactic of restrictive housing covenants.” Despite his anger, Alexander shows remarkable empathy by investigating the killers’ forsaken childhoods and lives in prison. Finally, observing, “I had gone from professional athlete to professional victim,” the author concludes by discussing his adoption of five Haitian orphans, a difficult ordeal with a more positive outcome.
A bleak but thoughtful look at the curse of urban violence, both its causalities and its long-term effects.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6576-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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