A harrowing chronicle of a fight for justice.
An account of the anti-Castro hatred that infected 1990s Miami.
In 1996, a Cuban jet fighter downed a plane flying over Cuban airspace dropping anti-Castro leaflets, a mission sanctioned by Miami’s right-wing Cuban exiles. Immediately, the enraged Cuban community called for justice, and five men—none of whom had been in Cuba at the time—were arrested, tried, convicted for spying, and imprisoned in the United States. One of them, Gerardo Hernández, received 2 life sentences. Ten years later, eminent trial lawyer Garbus (The Next 25 Years: The New Supreme Court and What It Means for Americans, 2007, etc.), after reading more than 20,000 pages of trial transcript and “a mountain of connected documents,” decided to represent Hernández to reverse his conviction, convinced that his client was innocent and had been denied a fair trial. By the time he took the case, Garbus already had a distinguished career defending prominent dissidents, including Daniel Ellsberg, Cesar Chavez, and the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla. Although he realized that Hernández’s case was “nearly hopeless,” he admits that “by psychology, instinct, and training, I respond to injustice by running toward it, to see what I can do to correct it.” The trial of the Cuban Five, as the defendants came to be known, was rife with misconduct: an inexperienced judge who rejected six motions for a change of venue, forcing the trial to proceed in a community “actively organized against the defendants”; inflammatory pre-trial publicity that amounted to a “propaganda crusade”; ineffective defense strategy; and an inevitably biased jury. Garbus chronicles his efforts to win justice for Hernández, a combination of dogged work, luck, surprising new evidence, and an evolving political climate in which a thaw in Cuban–U.S. relations seemed possible. He movingly portrays the pain, degradation, and hardship his client experienced as well as his own frustrations with prison officials who “complicated and interfered” with his work in every way possible. His impassioned book is both an indictment of the legal system and a plea for prison reform.
A harrowing chronicle of a fight for justice.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62097-446-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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