A true-crime tale told with earnest compassion and cultural sensitivity.
A medical professional recounts an immigrant family’s tragedy and their encounter with the American justice system in this nonfiction book.
Hood didn’t go looking for Panna Krom, but circumstances conspired for their paths to cross. In 2011, he was winding down from a career in Connecticut as a physician’s assistant when a friend suggested that he volunteer for a writing group at a local women’s prison, York Correctional Institution, in Niantic. Through another prisoner in the class, he met Krom, a Thai Cambodian refugee who’d been charged with first-degree manslaughter at 17 after delivering a baby in her family’s apartment bathroom; the investigation concluded that the baby had drowned in the toilet and that Krom had hidden the body in her closet. Panna and her parents complied with whatever the police said, and authorities eventually arrested Krom; by the time she and Hood met, she’d already served six years of an 18-year sentence. Despite his admitted lack of legal acumen, Hood does his best over the course of this book to try to parse her and her family’s story and get to the truth of what happened. What the police determined to be a straightforward homicide, he asserts, was actually a tragic situation that was the result of a teenager’s acute panic, compounded by intergenerational trauma and the coping mechanisms of war and genocide survivors; he describes the latter in detail, using such sources as a report by Khmer Health Advocates, a group of psychological clinicians who interviewed Krom: “Men and women who lived through the Khmer Rouge genocide, their final report noted, needed lies in order to survive.…To talk about it was tantamount to making the trauma happen again.”
In a time of increasingly tenuous immigration and reproductive freedoms in the United States, Krom’s case illuminates a number of failures in interlocking systems: failure to support traumatized refugees, justice proceedings that give women of color longer sentences, and the media’s failure to protect the identities of minors. Hood’s yearslong association with Krom and her parents bleeds into the story, offering an intimacy that many true-crime stories lack; over the course of years, he managed to get Krom’s parents to divulge accounts of the suffering that they faced in Cambodia and in refugee camps in Thailand. Krom’s personal narrative and those of her family members make up the core of the book, with some detours to fill in Hood’s personal details and to chronicle situations that were similar to Krom’s but had very different outcomes, in order to contextualize the relative severity of Krom’s sentence. The book, at times, feels closer to Krom’s parents, Chan and Song, than it does to Krom herself; she rarely divulged how she felt about the baby, for example. There are occasional typographical errors over the course of the book, which readers may find to be distracting. Overall, though, Hood presents a sad story with a great deal of empathy, as well as an ample amount of detail.
A true-crime tale told with earnest compassion and cultural sensitivity.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2022
ISBN: 9798986820316
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Atacama Books, LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
SEEN & HEARD
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