A harrowing chronicle of a fight for justice.
An account of the anti-Castro hatred that infected 1990s Miami.
In 1996, a Cuban jet fighter downed a plane flying over Cuban airspace dropping anti-Castro leaflets, a mission sanctioned by Miami’s right-wing Cuban exiles. Immediately, the enraged Cuban community called for justice, and five men—none of whom had been in Cuba at the time—were arrested, tried, convicted for spying, and imprisoned in the United States. One of them, Gerardo Hernández, received 2 life sentences. Ten years later, eminent trial lawyer Garbus (The Next 25 Years: The New Supreme Court and What It Means for Americans, 2007, etc.), after reading more than 20,000 pages of trial transcript and “a mountain of connected documents,” decided to represent Hernández to reverse his conviction, convinced that his client was innocent and had been denied a fair trial. By the time he took the case, Garbus already had a distinguished career defending prominent dissidents, including Daniel Ellsberg, Cesar Chavez, and the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla. Although he realized that Hernández’s case was “nearly hopeless,” he admits that “by psychology, instinct, and training, I respond to injustice by running toward it, to see what I can do to correct it.” The trial of the Cuban Five, as the defendants came to be known, was rife with misconduct: an inexperienced judge who rejected six motions for a change of venue, forcing the trial to proceed in a community “actively organized against the defendants”; inflammatory pre-trial publicity that amounted to a “propaganda crusade”; ineffective defense strategy; and an inevitably biased jury. Garbus chronicles his efforts to win justice for Hernández, a combination of dogged work, luck, surprising new evidence, and an evolving political climate in which a thaw in Cuban–U.S. relations seemed possible. He movingly portrays the pain, degradation, and hardship his client experienced as well as his own frustrations with prison officials who “complicated and interfered” with his work in every way possible. His impassioned book is both an indictment of the legal system and a plea for prison reform.
A harrowing chronicle of a fight for justice.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62097-446-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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