A strong regional true-crime tale with disturbing noirish undertones and undeniable spiritual flair.
An engrossing examination of an Ozarks triple murder and its strangely sympathetic perpetrator, who avoided execution via the pope’s intervention.
As in his American Exorcism (2001), Cuneo (Sociology/Fordham) methodically examines a tangled American subculture, rife with extremism and religious fervor. Here, he addresses the outlaw archetype that’s endured within southwestern Missouri culture, at odds with the milieu presented to the state’s Branson-bound tourists. Darrell Mease was the most charming boy in Reeds Spring, Missouri, and his idyllic childhood bred within him the region’s strict Pentecostalism; yet Vietnam, failed marriages, and involvement in the Ozarks methamphetamine scene left him a fractured and paranoid man. Following disputes with feared local drug kingpin Lloyd Lawrence (whose ordinary lifestyle belied a brutal history, including the rape of his own daughters), Mease fled Missouri with stolen meth and with Mary Epps, whom he considered his true love; Lloyd then put out murder contracts upon both. Cuneo argues that an unspoken code of Ozarks vengeance, developed in response to historically corrupt law enforcement, influenced Mease’s decision to return and settle accounts with Lloyd; in a shocking ambush, he shotgunned Lloyd, his wife, and handicapped grandson. After several months on the lam, Mease was captured and confessed in an attempt to protect Mary; following his 1989 conviction and death sentence, he experienced a jailhouse conversion, claiming that God would not allow his execution. Incredibly, the 1999 papal visit to St. Louis forced postponement of Mease’s execution date; after noting this, the Vatican indeed prevailed upon then-governor Mel Carnahan to commute Mease’s sentence to life. (Yet, Cuneo concludes that Missouri’s pro-execution politics have since continued unabated.) Despite a slightly dry prose style, Cuneo is skillful at nailing down the elusive stories of warts-and-all heartland America; he does a fine job of untangling this complex affair’s ambiguities, in which idealized rural lifestyles collide tragically with the concentrated violence of both the drug war and state-sanctioned capital punishment.
A strong regional true-crime tale with disturbing noirish undertones and undeniable spiritual flair.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-7679-1342-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The experiment could be a useful one, though it will darken the hearts of the dark lords—a winning argument all its own.
In a book whose title says it all, technoprophet Lanier (Dawn of the New Everything, 2017, etc.) weighs in against predatory technoprofit.
In a world of dogs, it’s better to be a cat. So, in this brief polemic, writes the author, who uses the animal terms advisedly: Dogs are easily trained to respond to stimuli, as Ivan Pavlov knew; humans are as easily trained, à la B.F. Skinner, when given proper rewards. “Dog whistles,” Lanier adds meaningfully, “can only be heard by dogs.” Cats, on the other hand, live in the world while somehow not being quite of it, a model for anyone seeking to get out of the grasp of algorithms and maybe go outside for a calming walk. The metaphor has value. So does the acronym BUMMER, which Lanier coins to sum up the many pieces of his argument: “Behavior of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent.” It’s a little clunky, but the author scores points with more direct notes: “E,” he writes, “is for Earning money from letting the worst assholes secretly screw with everyone else.” As we’re learning from the unfolding story of Cambridge Analytica, which just filed for bankruptcy, he’s got a point. Lanier advocates untethering from social media, which fosters addiction and anomie and generally makes us feel worse and more fearful about each other and the world. Continuing the dog metaphor, it—Lanier uses “media” as a singular noun, which, considering its monolithic nature, may no longer send grammarians screaming—also encourages pack behavior, howling at strangers and sounds in the night. His central objection, though, would seem to be this: “We have enshrined the belief that the only way to finance a connection between two people is through a third person who is paying to manipulate them.” If we accept that, then it’s self-evident why one would want to unplug.
The experiment could be a useful one, though it will darken the hearts of the dark lords—a winning argument all its own.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-19668-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-informed, scary, sobering, and sure to tick off police officers and prosecutors even as it contributes to keeping...
Building on his much-viewed YouTube video “Don’t Talk to the Police,” former criminal defense attorney and legal scholar Duane (Regent Univ. School of Law) offers a cogent, concise argument for keeping silent.
Why is it, asks the author, that public officials who are being questioned so often invoke their constitutional right not to self-incriminate? Because they know the law. More to the point, he suggests, they know the many ways in which all-too-human investigators can misinterpret and twist words—and that the system is fundamentally corrupt to begin with. Though the last bit may be cynical, Duane means it without hyperbole: on any given day, an American adult breaks three laws without even knowing that he or she has done so, very often as a result of unforeseen consequences of good intentions. “That is why,” Duane writes, “you cannot listen to your conscience when faced by a police officer and think, I have nothing to hide.” If the law is corrupt, then so are law enforcement officers, not necessarily out of evil intent but because they have quotas to fulfill, performance evaluations to meet, and so on—and because, increasingly, there’s an us-against-the-world mentality governing the precinct house. So what to do? Duane counsels common sense, noting that there are reasons and situations that call for cooperating with the police. If, however, there’s the remotest chance that suspicion will fall on you, he adds, then it’s a good idea to think Fifth (and Sixth) Amendment and to remember that, thanks to Antonin Scalia’s influence on the Supreme Court, it’s no longer possible to believe that “only guilty people would ever knowingly refuse to talk to the police,” even if the police and the courts seem to think so.
Well-informed, scary, sobering, and sure to tick off police officers and prosecutors even as it contributes to keeping innocent people out of jail.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5039-3339-2
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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