An impressively well-rendered true-crime saga.
Thrilling account of a violent California bank robbery whose damage “keeps rippling out through the generations.”
Houlahan’s debut is remarkable for the exhaustive, sometimes exhausting level of detail he brings to every stage of the story, transforming a pulpy true-crime narrative into a reflection of social transformations and class conflict as the countercultural 1970s faded into the Reagan era. The author argues that the robbers, aimless blue-collar friends who’d dabbled in evangelicalism and doomsday scenarios, “were looking at American society and seeing a house of cards teetering on collapse.” The crime was meant to bankroll plans for a survivalist compound; yet their sense of rage was indicated by the arsenal of assault rifles and improvised explosives. The amateurish robbery devolved into a running firefight with outgunned law enforcement officers which Houlahan documents as an exacting, extended set piece. Following a massive, improvised police response, the criminals fled into nearby wilderness after killing one officer, wounding many others, and being wounded themselves, only to be captured the next day. As one stunned cop observed in the aftermath, “we just got our asses kicked, didn’t we?” The author then goes into the long, chaotic trial. With the three surviving suspects universally loathed and the death penalty in the balance, it became an early media circus marked by “insolence, impertinence, and contemptuous and childish behavior.” Houlahan follows up on the robbery’s long shadow over many officers and civilians who were caught in the melee, delving into subtopics including the evolution of tactics in response to such crimes and departments’ reluctance to offer counseling for PTSD, which compelled some embittered survivors to leave policing. Houlahan’s writing is dense, sometimes colloquial, well-researched, and mostly clear. While his enthusiastic focus on details of the hardscrabble region’s history, characters’ social backgrounds, the botched robbery and its bloody aftermath, the weapons and tactics used by both sides, and finally the long-term changes in policing can occasionally overwhelm, most readers will stay engrossed.
An impressively well-rendered true-crime saga.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-212-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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