A hard-hitting, meaningful, and debate-inspiring exposé on one of the darkest elements of the criminal justice system.
The evolution of capital punishment in America.
Austin-based journalist Chammah, a staff writer for the Marshall Project, effectively splits his report between a history of the death penalty and its incremental downfall in recent decades. He focuses predominantly on Texas, an ultraconservative state at the epicenter of the debate, and examines how public opinion has shifted to embrace other punishments, such as life without parole. The author first charts the historical rise of executions from the early 1970s, corresponding with a dramatic rise in violent crime. In Texas, the political conversation has been focused on the types of crime that warrant it as well as consideration of a defendant’s “future dangerousness.” The state’s long history of “frontier justice” has meant that “of the roughly fifteen hundred executions that Americans have carried out since the 1970s, Texas has been responsible for more than five hundred.” Chammah profiles several key figures, including Elsa Alcala, a former assistant district attorney and judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals; and Danalynn Recer, a lawyer and prominent death penalty opponent. In dramatic fashion, the author also interweaves details about high-profile capital crime cases. Among others, he thoroughly examines the executions of Karla Faye Tucker (1998) and Shaka Sankofa (2000), looking at the cases from multiple angles. Throughout, the author keenly probes critical perspectives on whether compassion is warranted for death row convicts or if the act of fitting the punishment with the crime is sufficient. “Both sides,” he writes, “need to downplay and amplify free will, only at different moments in their narratives.” With great conviction, Chammah presents an expansive portrait of the death penalty through the perspectives of opponents, defenders, families of the executed, and the sentenced themselves, illuminating a passionately debated issue with cleareyed impartiality. The author’s inclusion of so many legal cases detracts from the narrative but doesn't weaken its premise or impact.
A hard-hitting, meaningful, and debate-inspiring exposé on one of the darkest elements of the criminal justice system.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6026-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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