Poignant and humane.
A compelling account of the life of Troy Davis (1968–2011), the Georgia-born black man condemned to death for the killing of a white policeman.
When Officer Mark MacPhail was brutally gunned down in August 1989, the city of Savannah “was out for blood.” The man apprehended for that shooting, Davis, proclaimed his innocence until the day of his death in September 2011. Documentarian Marlowe (co-author: The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian's Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker, 2011) tells the moving story of Davis and his activist sister, Martina Davis-Correia. Born just 17 months apart, they were as close as “two peas in a pod.” After neighborhood associates—some of whom spoke under duress from the Savannah police—pinned the crime on Davis, Davis-Correia vowed to fight on behalf of her brother. Through multiple appeals and stays of execution that took place over 22 grueling years, never once did her faith in her brother’s innocence waver. It only grew stronger, especially after the associates who blamed her brother for MacPhail’s death eventually retracted their statements regarding Davis’ involvement in the murder and admitted that they had lied under oath. Correia did not fare as well, developing breast cancer. Nevertheless, the two siblings remained committed to each other. Davis became a beloved surrogate father to his sister’s son and inspired him to work “against inequality and injustice,” while Correia worked tirelessly for her brother’s freedom. The state of Georgia finally executed Davis by lethal injection. Two months later, Correia passed away. Marlowe became involved with the case in 2008 and recounts events with compassion for both the Davises and the MacPhails, who declined to participate in the writing of her book. The result is a powerful narrative that challenges the notion that “the taking of one life can be answered by the taking of another.”
Poignant and humane.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60846-294-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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