A heady yarn of sports, celebrity, racism, crime, justice, and redemption. (Author tour)
Former reporter Hirsch spins a riveting, straight-ahead account of one of the great miscarriages of justice in the history of
American criminal law, and the fight to overturn it. Rubin "Hurricane" Carter was once a popular middleweight contender. Like many black celebrities of the mid-1960s, the physically imposing Carter, who radiated outspoken confidence, was seen as a threat by the white establishment. One night in 1966, Carter and an acquaintance named John Artis were questioned by police about a gruesome triple homicide; a few weeks later, the two were arrested for the crime. The resulting trial, held in the racially charged town of Paterson, New Jersey, before a predominantly white jury, introduced an array of specious prosecutorial evidence, including manufactured witnesses and a highly dubious motive—racial revenge, for the recent barroom murder of two black persons. Nevertheless, Carter was convicted and sentenced to three life terms. Arriving in prison, he steadfastly maintained his innocence. As an innocent man, he reasoned, he had no responsibility to follow prison policies: He wore his own clothes, ate his own food, and, most important, devoured literary and philosophical works and legal texts. While in stir, Carter mounted an ongoing defense of amazing clarity and sophistication that became a cause c‚lSþbre among the radical-chic crowd (Bob Dylan immortalized the boxer in the song "Hurricane"). Carter also wrote a book, The Sixteenth Round, which caught the attention of black Brooklyn teenager Lesra Martin, who was the adopted ward of a white Toronto commune. The boy brought Carter’s plight to "the Canadians," as the commune members came to be known, and before long, Carter had some very supportive friends who, along with some persistent attorneys, succeeded in getting Carter’s and Artis’s convictions thrown out—though not in recovering nearly 20 years of the men’s lives.
A heady yarn of sports, celebrity, racism, crime, justice, and redemption. (Author tour)Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2000
ISBN: 0-395-97985-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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