Frequently profane, steeped in violent imagery, and sometimes unduly speculative, but Horne tells the whole story.
The city editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune analyzes an extraordinary sequence of events that turned a cut-and-dried murder case into a protracted, racially tinged mangling of due process.
Horne’s first book opens with a grisly recounting of the 1984 murder of white housewife and grandmother Delores Dye, accosted in an outlying section of a supermarket parking lot and summarily shot in the head, apparently for purposes of robbery and carjacking. There were eyewitnesses, one close enough to be terrified for his own life, and in due course a known drug dealer named Curtis Kyles was arrested and brought to trial. This is not a straightforward retelling; from the outset Horne lets the story marinate in redolent language as poverty, hopelessness, and a daily diet of black-on-black crimes seep into the picture from Kyles’s flat on Desire Street in the infamous Ninth Ward. Kyles was brought to trial twice, convicted, and sat on Death Row for more than a dozen years through an unprecedented three subsequent trials while noted District Attorney Harry Connick (Sr.) marshaled his minions to reshape a capital case that a jury might buy. During the ordeal, rumors surfaced: Kyles was actually set up by his opposite number in a love triangle; the cops knew about it and went along, “inclined to cut corners in the name of getting another nigger off the street.” The rumors gained plausibility from New Orleans’ well-known proclivity for extremes in good and bad times, not to mention its endemic political corruption. After 14 years, with the case still essentially unsolved, Kyles was released. Horne sums up the story as a study in “the persistence of a determined prosecutor [and] the persistence of racism in the post-segregation South,” with the objective of justice for Delores Dye long since relegated to oblivion.
Frequently profane, steeped in violent imagery, and sometimes unduly speculative, but Horne tells the whole story.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-13825-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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