An inside look at the Rodney King case, the ensuing trials, and the L.A. riots that followed, by the private detective hired by King's attorney to investigate the police officers' conduct and provide security for the beleaguered beating victim. A former L.A. policeman, Owens does not claim to tell ``the Rodney King story,'' but rather, with the help of Hollywood writer Browning, to give ``the factual version.'' In reviewing his own 12 years on the LAPD (he's oddly vague as to dates, when he resigned and why, what he did prior to opening his agency, etc.), he contends that the violence demonstrated by the officers that night in March 1991 is systemic, and that there is a ``code of silence'' that helps ``explain the attitudes of some of the officers'' caught in the act on George Holliday's now famous videotape. One of Owens' first moves was to find and interview the two men who were with King during the beating, both of whom sustained injuries inflicted by the police. He also discovered a second videotape, this one showing reactions of onlookers in the immediate aftermath of the beating. His background checks of the four officers revealed an array of charges of abuse and misconduct. Owens believes the ``not guilty'' verdicts in the Simi Valley criminal trial, which ignited the riots, came about because the jurors were desensitized from repeated viewing of the video: ``In the end [they] simply didn't believe their eyes...they believed the beating King got was justified.'' In fact, Owens encountered that attitude among members of his own staff. His probings met opposition from his former fellow officers, with the exception of ``Blue Throat,'' an unidentified person at LAPD who provided him with daily logs, arrest reports, etc. Not an apologist for King, Owens does not view him ``as a hero'' but as ``a victim whose victimization continues.'' His opinions as a former cop are of some interest, as are his personal insight into King and the entire affair. But Owens allows amateur psychological conjecture to intrude on his day-to-day, procedural work on the case. (Eight pages b&w insert—not seen)
Pub Date: March 5, 1994
ISBN: 1-56025-074-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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