A fascinating, nonpartisan view into the world of executioners, their methods, and the thoughts of their victims. Not since Michael Lesy's The Forbidden Zone (1987) has an author looked at execution so directly. Trombley, an Englishman, travels the American nether world with fresh and appreciative eyes. His first stop is with Fred Leuchter, inventor of the lethal-injection machine and the improved electric chair, and author of the authoritative modern text on hanging. Leuchter, whose motto is ``capital punishment, not capital torture,'' is driven to distraction by botched executions, such as incompetent electrocutions that cause intense pain and cook a man's flesh on his bones. Trombley then travels to Missouri to view a gas chamber, a machine that Leuchter considers messy, dangerous, and difficult to operate: Most gas chambers were built in the 20's and are full of crumbling seals and rotting gaskets. In Florida, Trombley looks at the state's homemade electric chair. In 1990, he reports, the Florida executioner had to use three jolts of electricity—while smoke and three-inch-high flames spewed out of the inmate's head—in order to kill his man. Finally, in Potosi, Missouri, in a prison that houses only men under death sentence or doing life plus 50 years, Trombley meets a warden and assistant who are proud of their work, consider the inmates fellow human beings, and are expert at the use of the lethal- injection machine. There, Trombley is allowed to talk to any inmate under death sentence, including one extremely intelligent man who, during his friend's execution, ``cried in frustration to think he had trudged through the rice paddies in Vietnam...only to return to the United States and be put to death like a dog at the veterinarians being `put to sleep.' '' And evenhanded, well-written, and hard-hitting study that should be required reading for those on both sides of the death penalty debate. (Nineteen b&w illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-517-59113-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
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Not an easy read but an essential one.
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Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A London-based journalist offers her perspective on race in Britain in the early 21st century.
In 2014, Eddo-Lodge published a blog post that proclaimed she was “no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race.” After its viral reception, she realized that her mission should be to do the opposite, so she actively began articulating, rather than suppressing, her feelings about racism. In the first chapter, the author traces her awakening to the reality of a brutal British colonial history and the ways that history continues to impact race relations in the present, especially between blacks and the police. Eddo-Lodge analyzes the system that has worked against blacks and kept them subjugated to laws that work against—rather than for—them. She argues that it is not enough to deconstruct racist structures. White people must also actively see race itself by constantly asking “who benefits from their race and who is disproportionately impacted by negative stereotypes.” They must also understand the extent of the privileges granted them because of their race and work through racist fears that, as British arch-conservative Enoch Powell once said, “the black man will [one day] have the whip hand over the white man.” Eddo-Lodge then explores the fraught question of being a black—and therefore, according to racist stereotype—“angry” female and the ways her “assertiveness, passion and excitement” have been used against her. In examining the relationship between race and class, the author further notes the way British politicians have used the term “white” to qualify working class. By leaving out reference to other members of that class, they “compound the currency-like power of whiteness.” In her probing and personal narrative, Eddo-Lodge offers fresh insight into the way all racism is ultimately a “white problem” that must be addressed by commitment to action, no matter how small. As she writes, in the end, “there's no justice, there's just us.”
A sharp, compelling, and impassioned book.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4088-7055-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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SEEN & HEARD
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