by Yasin S.A. Cobb ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 22, 2018
A sometimes-moving, sometimes-simplistic take on the problem of race and justice.
Black men are still being lynched by overtly racist cops and subtly racist courts and laws, according to this debut book.
Cobb, a minister, argues that latter-day incidents of police killings of unarmed black men, along with disproportionately harsh sentences given to black defendants, constitute a reprise of the lynching of black men in the South during the Jim Crow era. He begins his impassioned work with a history of lynching, from Reconstruction through the Emmett Till killing in 1955 and the murders of civil rights activists, noting the role of these crimes in enforcing racial segregation and suppressing African-American labor and political organizing. This section, illustrated with grisly photographs, is a powerful reminder of the pervasive violence blacks faced during that time. The author proceeds to apply the concept of lynching to contemporary police brutality and criminal justice disparities. He cites statistics showing that police kill unarmed black men at a much higher rate than white men, and that blacks are more likely to get the death penalty than whites who commit similar crimes. He also criticizes drug laws that disproportionately affect minorities. (He served 10 years in federal prison on what he believes were inflated drug charges.) Along the way, he revisits notorious cases, like the police killing of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black Cleveland youngster who was playing with a toy gun, and more obscure ones, such as the nonfatal shooting of Charles Kinsey, a black health worker trying to help an autistic patient, who was shot by Florida police while lying on the ground in broad daylight, unarmed, with his hands up. From these tragic case studies, Cobb makes a cogent argument about the ongoing unfairness in policing and the legal system. But his assertion that “police assault and shoot African- American males almost randomly” seems exaggerated, and his comparison of police killings, many done in a split second under chaotic circumstances by officers uncertain about the risks they face, to the deliberate public lynchings of the Jim Crow regime feels overdone. In addition, the author’s doctrinaire theorizing—“Within neo-colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the black male body continues to be perceived as an embodiment of bestial, violent, penis-as-weapon hyper-masculine assertion”—doesn’t always clarify a complex reality.
A sometimes-moving, sometimes-simplistic take on the problem of race and justice.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5447-0229-2
Page Count: 236
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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