An uneven but rigorously reported, urgent book.
A 2006 murder in New Haven, Connecticut, provides a framework for a wide-ranging study of the problems of life in cities divided by class and race and of the effects of an inept or corrupt police system.
Journalist Dawidoff, who was born in New York City but grew up in New Haven, examines in great detail the murder of Herbert “Pete” Fields Jr., a crime for which 16-year-old Bobby Johnson was falsely accused and convicted. He served nine years of a 38-year prison term before he was exonerated and released. The text—compassionate, thoughtful, and thorough to a fault—is caught somewhat uncomfortably between a sociological study of the causes and results of racial division and a more straightforward narrative of Bobby's conviction, imprisonment, and bumpy reentry into society. The author spent hundreds of hours interviewing hundreds of people, including Bobby, his family members, the lawyer who dedicated years of his life to getting Bobby released from prison, Fields' family members, and other residents of the economically depressed Newhallville neighborhood, which Dawidoff describes as “a fully formed working-class neighborhood without any work.” The author’s research and dedication to the project are clear, but the book would have benefitted from a stronger editorial hand. Readers anxious to get on with the story may get bogged down in the long account, drawing on Fields' sister's memoir, of his childhood in South Carolina. Certain chapters—e.g., an indictment of Yale for its lack of action in the city—are not thoroughly integrated into the narrative structure. Overall, though, Dawidoff presents a compelling examination of a situation in which police officers eager to put another case in the “solved” column ignored obvious evidence and coerced a teenager into a confession of a crime he didn't commit. Anyone with grand illusions about the American justice system will have lost them by the end.
An uneven but rigorously reported, urgent book.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-00202-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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