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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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