Intermittent rays of hope and ultimate freedom cast some light on an otherwise dark narrative of decades-long despair.
An inmate’s harrowing first-person account of a travesty of Texas jurisprudence.
On Aug. 5, 1977, 21-year-old bartender Kerry Cook was arrested in Tyler, Tex., charged with the brutal rape and murder of 21-year-old Linda Jo Edwards. The case against him was circumstantial at best; police had a single fingerprint on the sliding-glass door of Edwards’s apartment, but nothing else to place him at the crime scene and no obvious motive. Everything depended on a jury buying the idea, based on a professional profiler’s testimony, that it was a stranger-on-stranger crime committed by a deranged drifter with a criminal record. Evidence that Cook had actually known the victim was suppressed, and a number of defense witnesses were disallowed over the course of several trials. First convicted in 1978, Cook was raped and sexually abused in prison. He twice attempted suicide; prosecutors in later trials cited this as evidence of his “violent” tendencies. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed his initial conviction on technical grounds in 1991. His second trial in 1992 ended in a hung jury. Tried a third time in 1994, he was again convicted and sentenced to death. With the crucial aid of lawyer Paul Nugent, he obtained another reversal in 1996. “Prosecutorial and police misconduct has tainted this entire matter from the outset,” stated the TCCA decision, which nonetheless left the door open for Tyler authorities to retry Cook so long as they made no use of the discredited evidence. Facing an unprecedented fourth capital-murder trial in 1999, Cook refused to plead guilty to obtain a release but took the state’s bizarre deal for a no-contest plea that released him on time served. He was not exonerated, even though DNA evidence eventually pointed to another logical suspect.
Intermittent rays of hope and ultimate freedom cast some light on an otherwise dark narrative of decades-long despair.Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-057464-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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