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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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