Compulsively readable true crime provoking questions about policing, poverty, and the ritualized brutality of the rural...
Grisly account of unsolved murders in a small Louisiana town.
New Orleans–based investigative reporter Brown (Shake the Devil Off: A True Story of the Murder that Rocked New Orleans, 2009, etc.) spent two years unraveling the stories behind the impoverished, addicted sex workers murdered in hardscrabble Jennings, Louisiana. While media and police inflated fears of a serial killer, the author argues the murders resulted from collusion between corrupt law enforcement and drug dealers, seeking to punish the women for informing. “It should have been obvious all along,” he writes, “that the Jeff Davis 8 killings were not the handiwork of a serial killer…[since they] all knew one another intimately.” Brown focuses on Frankie Richard, an aging pimp whom the author interviewed extensively; although Richard proclaims his innocence, Brown documents connections among him, the victims, and cops who conveniently mishandled evidence against him. His portrait of law enforcement is damning, identifying powerful officials “who were accustomed to maintaining inappropriately intimate connections with those on the wrong side of the law.” Although a task force was launched in response to public anger, Brown accuses them of ineptitude and misconduct; in one startling example, an investigator bought, cleaned, and resold a truck that may have been used in one murder. The author views these seamy details as congruent with a culture of police violence and a regional underground of drugs and criminality that treats such women as disposable; distressingly, the victims themselves seemed to concur, with the mother of one noting, “I think she could feel that they were closing in on her.” Brown’s writing is clear and approachable, and his research is meticulous, even as locals grew hostile toward his investigation (his final chapters argue connections to political figures beyond Jennings). Although he presents few concrete answers to these mysteries, readers will be shaken by the unpleasant implications of a narrative bearing similarities to the first season of True Detective.
Compulsively readable true crime provoking questions about policing, poverty, and the ritualized brutality of the rural South.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9325-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2016
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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