This intricate re-creation of the February 1993 murder of three-year-old James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys in Bottle, England, is ugly, painful reading. Grisly and excessively detailed, the book attempts a delicate balance between potential sensationalism and informed, balanced journalism. To Smith's credit, it works. ``By way of recovering a perspective,'' he presents a long history of child crime to demonstrate that it is not new, not a result of the television age, not an ``emblem of decay'' in morals and values. Smith precisely retraces the path of Denise Bulger and her little boy, James, as they went shopping at the New Strand Mall nearly two years ago. He picks up with Jon Venables and Bobby Thompson at the moment they decide to skip school in favor of a shoplifting spree. (Amazingly, security cameras in a number of stores recorded the progress of both parties.) Jon and Bobby lured James away from his mother while she was in a butcher's shop. She noticed he was missing almost immediately and notified security. But by then the three boys were on a two-and-a-half-mile trek during which they were witnessed by dozens of people who assumed James was simply a fussy little brother. A few adults did confront them, noting the lumps and scratches on James's tear-streaked face, but paid no further attention. When his body was found on the railroad tracks near Walton Lane, his head had been bludgeoned and his torso severed by the trains. Blue paint and blood spattered everywhere matched the stains on Jon and Bobby's clothing. Smith includes the awful investigative interviews with the boys, recounting their versions of what they did, and details their trial on charges of abduction and murder. Found guilty, they will serve 15 years before being eligible for release. His amateur pop-psychological analyses of the killers' family lives aside, Smith, a solid writer and an excellent reporter (he writes for Esquire), makes this horrendous story almost readable. (Photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-439-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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