Masterful account of the torture/murder of three Navajos by white teenagers. Farmington, New Mexico, the only major Anglo community for hundreds of miles, lies beside the reservation of the largest Indian tribe in the US—the Navajos. The discovery in 1974 of the battered bodies of three Navajo men and the subsequent arrest of three teenagers for their murder brought Navajos into Farmington's streets in several marches for equal justice, which were ended by an apparent police riot. During questioning, the teenagers claimed to have only ``rolled'' the victims but, here, Barker (The Hiroshima Maidens, 1985) draws on his own interviews to reveal the appalling secret behind the murders. The ``rolling'' of Indians, it seems, was a common sport of high- school boys and was winked at by authorities. Picking up drunk Indians—whom they called ``subs'' (subhumans)—teenagers drove them into the desert, where they were kicked, beaten, and pushed over cliffs, with their belts and boots stolen for trophies. When the three accused teenagers were sent to reform school for two years instead of being tried for murder, there was an outpouring of disgust among the Navajos, and it was rumored that medicine men had placed a curse on the killers. Barker, who nurtured a strong friendship with the widow of one of the slain Indians, evokes her viewpoint and life story in an extraordinarily vivid picture of how Indians live today, and he goes on to explore in rare depth the lives of the killers. One was mentally ill, he tells us, but the other two mirrored community attitudes: In 1974, Farmington was considered the Indian-rights equivalent to Selma in the black struggle. Finally, Barker attempts to discover whether a curse had been placed on the slayers. He reports that one died in an accident, one suffered a kind of emotional death, and the third has been dogged by personal calamity. A thoughtful and important social document full of deep human insight; essential reading to understand the present-day lives of Native Americans.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-74146-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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