Complex, dense in detail, and sharply argued: a firm indictment of injustice committed on the street and in the courtroom.
An examination of a system that allowed malign police officers to walk free after murdering a suspect.
As with the case of George Floyd five years later, Freddie Carlos Gray Jr. was the victim of a judicial killing. Arrested by Baltimore police officers for possessing what they called an illegal weapon, he died of injuries after being in custody for less than an hour. According to investigative reporter Barron, Baltimore city authorities conspired to cover up the facts of the case, which included Gray’s being shackled and handcuffed and then bounced around unrestrained on a “rough ride” in the back of a police van, which may have resulted in the spinal injury that led to his death. Working through the discovery file, Barron flags numerous instances of misconduct coupled with ineptitude, willful obfuscation, and sometimes-inexplicable decisions. Maryland State Attorney Marilyn Mosby, for example, initially filed charges against six Baltimore officers that specified that the supposedly illegal knife was actually legal—therefore, “the arrest wasn’t legal and so constituted assault.” Yet as the proceedings moved forward, she dropped the charge, apparently acceding to an opposing attorney’s demand that the legality of the knife be excluded. Media reports, Barron adds, tended to uncritically repeat the police account of the incident, by which “Gray caused his own death by banging his head” repeatedly against the door and walls of the van. The Baltimore Sun, “the paper of record in the Gray case,” was particularly loyal to the police account. Meanwhile, notes the author, the U.S. Department of Justice appears to have suppressed or at least not presented eyewitness accounts that indicated that excessive force before the ride began may have been the true cause of death. In the end, whether by design or indifference, Barron ably demonstrates, the system definitively failed Freddie Gray. Rabia Chaudry provides the foreword.
Complex, dense in detail, and sharply argued: a firm indictment of injustice committed on the street and in the courtroom.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781950994250
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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 Yorkerstaff 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 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
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