An excellent addition to the body of work documenting a pervasive societal injustice.
A TV producer’s journey into the hellish landscape of wrongful convictions.
Slepian, a veteran producer of Dateline, narrates his involvement in a series of outrageous cases of wrongful conviction and long-term imprisonment. “My innocence work,” he writes, “had become a way into understanding the tragic consequences of America’s system of mass incarceration—for the innocent, the guilty, and all of society.” Beginning with the notorious Thanksgiving 1990 murder of a Palladium nightclub bouncer, the cases illuminate how, during New York’s high-crime years, authorities would overlook exculpatory evidence and dubious prosecutions. This investigation led the author to Sing Sing Prison and to “JJ Velazquez, the soul of this book,” who was jailed following witness misidentification in the murder of an ex-cop running a gambling parlor. “When I first met JJ in 2002” while working on a story for Dateline, writes the author, “I’d gone into my investigation skeptical of his innocence. By 2011, I was certain of it.” His focus intensified as he learned about more inmates at Sing Sing, including the “Bronx Six,” railroaded for two 1995 murders: “So many lives ruined, and for what? As I looked at the case, all I could see were bumbling cops hell-bent on making arrests as quickly as possible.” As he continued his investigation, Slepian encountered resistance, as damning information emerged about the NYPD bowing to political pressure for convictions. In addition to chronicling the plights of his subjects, the author includes his own perspective and self-deprecating background as a lifelong TV nerd turned outsider advocate, yet the narrative voice is brisk and punchy, contrasting with depictions of New York’s “bad old days” and the nightmarish circumstances of the wrongly convicted. The result is a gripping, highly effective true-crime synthesis.
An excellent addition to the body of work documenting a pervasive societal injustice.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781250897701
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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