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AN ACT OF STATE

Name: AN ACT OF STATE
Author: William F. Pepper
ISBN: 1-85984-695-5

THE EXECUTION OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

by William F. Pepper ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 20, 2003

This tumble from passion to rant hurts Pepper, but the fundamental injustice of the handling of the King assassination...

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Pepper, a lawyer and longtime investigator into the King shooting, musters copious evidence pointing to James Earl Ray’s not having acted alone.

In the almost 35 years since King was assassinated, Pepper has gathered an impressive array of testimony and evidence that, to even determined skeptics, throws major doubt over the state’s case against Ray. There is, most obviously, the verdict against Loyd Jowers in the wrongful-death civil suit brought by the King family. Then there is the avalanche of material—so much that it can tangle itself into a mare’s nest in Pepper’s rush to get it all down—from the circumstantial to the blatant, implicating the FBI, the intelligence services, and organized crime. And there are all the failures of the state to follow through on any number of leads that may have led to greater understanding of events. Pepper draws all of this information into his presentation, sometimes more and sometimes less cogently, yet the result is to show that something smells rotten in the state’s case. Had Pepper stopped there, he would have made his point to fence-sitters. Unfortunately, he feels the need to square the King case with the evils of the “transnational corporate masters” who run the country through the military and the media—“responsible for broadcasting mind-numbing commercialization, and causing the dumbing down of viewers who are constantly exposed to the standardization of thought”—in a screed so aggressively and sanctimoniously trite that even readers who agree with the basic premise will instinctively recoil. In these polemics, Pepper is at his most inconsistent: “The silence from media organizations was deafening,” he says of the Jowers verdict, though suggesting later that it was a “mighty Wurlitzer” at “full volume.”

This tumble from passion to rant hurts Pepper, but the fundamental injustice of the handling of the King assassination survives his missteps.

Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2003

ISBN: 1-85984-695-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Verso

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.