A comprehensive, illuminating and highly readable study of a notorious episode in the annals of the American justice system.
Vanity Fair contributing editor and Duke University alumnus Cohan (Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World, 2011) turns a microscopic lens on the 2006 scandal involving an alleged rape by members of the school’s lacrosse team.
The case of a group of white athletes at an elite Southern university accused of raping an African-American stripper exploded into national headlines in the spring of 2006 and continued to play out in the media over the following year. A confluence of perennial hot-button issues related to race, class, money, athletics, politics and power made the Duke lacrosse scandal perfect fodder for the traditional media and its growing online counterpart. Initial condemnation of the accused, whose team’s arrogant and often drunken behavior in the preceding years had drawn the ire of locals, professors and fellow students, eventually gave way to rising questions about the handling of the case by the Duke administration, the media and, most crucially, by the police and prosecution, led by Durham, N.C., District Attorney Mike Nifong. Cohan seemingly leaves no stone unturned in covering all aspects of the case: the criminal proceedings, the media coverage and its impact, and the issues raised in the community and at Duke and other similar schools. The author mostly refrains from editorializing, letting the voluminous evidence and historical record speak for itself, carried along by the story’s undeniably gripping drama. That he does have an opinion on the matter comes through, however, particularly in his descriptions of those involved. Nifong, whose epic mishandling of the case cost him his career and impacted the lives of all participants, remains unwilling, or unable, to comprehend his failures. Cohan’s book will hopefully help others avoid them.
A comprehensive, illuminating and highly readable study of a notorious episode in the annals of the American justice system.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8179-6
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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