Anecdotal more than analytical but of some interest to students of crime and punishment.
A curious exercise in the annals of gun violence, highlighting the life stories of six who turned to the gun for a solution.
When he conceived of this project, writes Chicago-based businessman and educator Patinkin (co-author: The Crippler, 2016), he wanted to “investigate unfamiliar life stories and thereby illuminate complicated social and cultural dynamics.” He has partially succeeded in doing so, having turned up widely diverse stories ranging from a drug dealer to a calculating murderer to police officers who have killed in the pursuit of their work. There are not many commonalities apart from the fact that it is too easy to procure and use a gun in America—especially at moments when one is at the end of his or her tether. Early on Patinkin writes that this is not a sociological or political treatise, and that is surely the case; in most instances the shooter talks, and Patinkin constructs a narrative around it: “They talked about crazy Darryl and how Lester’s gunshot must have scared the shit out of that cracker. It definitely was a weird situation”; “To solve all of his problems, and to collect the entirety of the life insurance benefit, he would have to murder not just his father, but his entire family”; “This internal inquisition played out for seconds that seemed like hours while Al kept his Sig Sauer 9mm leveled.” Patinkin does layer the stories he has collected with observations on larger themes. For example, he takes a brief look at the Black Lives Matter movement in connection with his account of an officer-involved shooting. But in the absence of more thoroughgoing analysis, the social and cultural dynamics go essentially unexplored, limiting the value of this book to a set of testimonials from which one might frame an argument for, or even against, enhanced gun control.
Anecdotal more than analytical but of some interest to students of crime and punishment.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62872-919-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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