A thick, thorough history as only an attorney could present.
A Gainesville, Florida, native focuses on his hometown and Alachua County to examine that state’s challenging task to end segregation.
As Gengler, a former corporate lawyer in Boston and Chicago, points out, that move was one of the most significant social changes in the United States since Reconstruction. Unfortunately, there was no road map and no magic tool kit to make it work. It all began with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which gave rise to freedom of choice, whereby students could apply to attend specific schools. The NAACP never accepted that as an end point, and few blacks moved to white schools. Funding problems, failed bond issues, a teacher’s strike, busing, and racial balancing were just some of the difficulties. In 1970, the Supreme Court ordered true integration of schools, which forced changes in curriculum and extracurricular activities and led to what the author calls episodic outbreaks of on-campus violence. Gengler, whose legal explanations are often prolix, focuses mostly on the courts and the herculean attempts of both black and white educators to ease the transition. The end of black schools seriously dampened the sense of community as well as the resources and creativity that created a wholesome environment. Brown was only the first lawsuit regarding desegregation; it was followed by Brown II and, more importantly, U.S. v. Jefferson County School Board in 1966. In that case, the judge ruled that the schools must take steps to end the dual-race model, but he gave no standard to evaluate the effectiveness of those steps. The Civil Rights Act restricted that ruling to de jure segregation—i.e., it didn’t carry over to schools segregated by residential patterns. There are few details or statistics omitted from this book, and explanations are exhaustive, but Gengler brings the characters involved to life, demonstrating their patience and dedication. After many failures, it was clear that reforms and rulings could only go so far; school leaders, teachers, parents, and students had to demand and work for change.
A thick, thorough history as only an attorney could present.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-948122-14-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Bias notwithstanding, particularly against what's called the "elites" of the legal profession, this is an intriguing look at...
A spirited account of how the relatively recent establishment of the Massachusetts School of Law struggled to survive despite the concentrated opposition of the American Bar Association.
In a style reminiscent of Tracy Kidder, freelance journalist Hagan conjures up a number of the colorful characters who helped launch MSL in the late '80s. Among the more flamboyant actors in this legal drama is Michael Boland, who founded MSL's immediate predecessor, the Commonwealth School of Law. Although it quickly shut down, due to Boland's mismanagement, he made at least one good move in hiring Lawrence Velvel as dean. By Hagan's account, Velvel, who has made a career out of his contrarian positions, was ideally suited to be dean of the fledgling school. After Commonwealth collapsed, Velvel and a cadre of motivated students formed MSL to take its place, offering a new model of legal education that targeted older, working-class students, offering them a practical education in the nuts-and-bolts of practice. With Boland out of the picture, Velvel and his partners still encountered opposition from the ABA, which refused to accredit the school. The central charge here against the ABA is that it seeks to maintain the status quo of the legal profession by stifling innovation and denying an affordable legal education to non-traditional students. Although MSL went as far as bringing an antitrust suit against the organization, it never received the accreditation it needed for perceived legitimacy. Nonetheless, Hagan, whose subjective viewpoint should be assumed, highlights what she considers the school's successes. (MSL, not Hagan, holds the copyright to the book–it's certainly a good piece of recruitment material.)
Bias notwithstanding, particularly against what's called the "elites" of the legal profession, this is an intriguing look at the near-insurmountable hurdles in creating a new breed of law school.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7618-2838-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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