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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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