Despite the impressive research and mostly compelling final chapter, much of the book feels like an information dump filled...
An in-depth examination of a well-known murder.
The book is not a whodunit. Rather, Los Angeles–based journalist McGough (Bat Boy: Coming of Age with the New York Yankees, 2005) offers a police procedural about why a 1986 murder took more than two decades to solve and whether police knowingly protected the murderer: one of their own detectives. The victim was Sherri Rasmussen, a 29-year-old nurse and newlywed who was killed while alone in her home in LA. Her parents and a few of her friends knew that she had been harassed before the murder by a longtime girlfriend of her husband, John. The harasser, Stephanie Lazarus, worked as a young LAPD officer at the time of the murder. John and Rasmussen’s father both told the author that they had informed homicide detectives about the harassment. However, because McGough did not start reporting about the murder until Lazarus’ 2009 arrest, he could not find definitive information in the messy, incomplete police files about the case. What the author’s painstaking digging clearly demonstrates, beyond a doubt, is that the detectives assigned to the case decided nearly right away that Rasmussen was murdered during a burglary gone wrong. Adoption of that theory led to tunnel vision, which meant that the idea of a fellow officer as the perpetrator never received serious attention until two decades later, when a detective looking at cold cases stumbled on the Rasmussen file. McGough does not discuss how the cold-case detectives nailed Lazarus until more than 500 pages in. Before that, he examines the quotidian lives of Sheri, John, and Stephanie while sometimes taking detours to examine dozens of other characters. Relying on extended citations from bureaucratic memos and other opaque documents, McGough delivers a fairly unremarkable narrative until the end of the book, when the investigation of Lazarus as the potential murderer begins.
Despite the impressive research and mostly compelling final chapter, much of the book feels like an information dump filled with irrelevant and repetitious details. Its 600 pages could have been 250.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9559-3
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.
Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Marylanddecision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61254-149-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
In this meticulously detailed and evocative book, history comes alive, and it isn’t pretty.
A meditation on Austria’s capitulation to the Nazis. The book won the 2017 Prix Goncourt.
Vuillard (Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business, 2017, etc.) is also a filmmaker, and these episodic vignettes have a cinematic quality to them. “The play is about to begin,” he writes on the first page, “but the curtain won’t rise….Even though the twentieth of February 1933 was not just any other day, most people spent the morning grinding away, immersed in the great, decent fallacy of work, with its small gestures that enfold a silent, conventional truth and reduce the entire epic of our lives to a diligent pantomime.” Having established his command of tone, the author proceeds through devastating character portraits of Hitler and Goebbels, who seduced and bullied their appeasers into believing that short-term accommodations would pay long-term dividends. The cold calculations of Austria’s captains of industries and the pathetic negotiations of leaders who knew that their protestations were mainly for show suggest the complicated complicity of a country where young women screamed for Hitler as if he were a teen idol. “The bride was willing; this was no rape, as some have claimed, but a proper wedding,” writes Vuillard. Yet the consummation was by no means as smoothly triumphant as the Nazi newsreels have depicted. The army’s entry into Austria was less a blitzkrieg than a mechanical breakdown, one that found Hitler stalled behind the tanks that refused to move as those prepared to hail his emergence wondered what had happened. “For it wasn’t only a few isolated tanks that had broken down,” writes the author, “not just the occasional armored truck—no, it was the vast majority of the great German army, and the road was now entirely blocked. It was like a slapstick comedy!” In the aftermath, some of those most responsible for Austria’s fall faced death by hanging, but at least one received an American professorship.
In this meticulously detailed and evocative book, history comes alive, and it isn’t pretty.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-969-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
GENERAL HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | MILITARY | HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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