Exciting tale of a legal battle against neo-Nazi skinhead goons, by the attorney who bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan. In A Season for Justice (1991), Dees and fellow attorney Fiffer revealed how Dees busted Grand Dragon Bobby Shelton and his KKK; now, the authors turn their attention to Dees's parallel confrontation with the White Aryan Resistance and its leader, 50-year-old Tom Metzger, America's most prominent white-supremacist revolutionary. A critical bit of information fell into Dees's lap in November 1988: A few weeks earlier, a young Ethiopian student, Mulugeta Seraw, had been clubbed to death by skinheads in Portland, Oregon. The trail of blood led indirectly to Metzger, who, Dees was convinced, had provoked the Portland rowdies. What ensued was a multiyear struggle to bring down Metzger in a civil case demanding $10 million in financial reparation for the Seraw family. The task was tough, especially as the key prosecution witness was Dave Mazzella, a volatile skinhead who fell afoul of the law several times during the proceedings. Perhaps Mazzella was erratic out of fear; after all, the previous leader of his neo-Nazi group, the Aryan Youth Movement, had been crucified—literally—when he quit the organization a few years back. Moreover, Metzger, a spellbinding speaker, planned to act as his own attorney, presenting a free-speech defense. The trial itself was a slugfest: Emotions ran high, and riot police were needed to protect those in the courtroom. But Mazzella delivered, and a horrifying portrait emerged of a subworld of ``berserkers'' and ``predators'' who attend ``Reich-and-Roll'' concerts when they're not busy killing. Dees won the case, which is now on appeal; Mazzella is in hiding. Scary stuff—according to Dees, skinhead violence is on the rise—with a gripping courtroom confrontation between hatred and righteousness. (B&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-40614-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Atlanticsenior 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
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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