nerdyrev's review against another edition
4.0
We know the story- On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner was surrounded by police for selling "loosies" (loose cigarettes). When he questions why he is being arrested, he attempts to walk away, when he is wrestled to the ground in a chokehold. As he is dying, he repeats the phrase- "I can't breathe" over and over again, until he dies. The police officer continued to hold him until he died. There was no indictment, but only an internal investigation. It was settled out of court for $5 million.
This book looks at the incident from all sorts of angles- what was happening at the time leading up to the death, what were the policing policies in place at the time, why was this hold used, etc. Taibbi talks to people that know Garner, people in similar situations, and proves a full account of that day.
I will admit I was a bit hesitant requesting this as a galley. The hesitancy came from the question- can a white guy tell a black man's story and do it well? Taibbi didn't have the experiences that Garner had and even though Taibbi is an incredible journalist, I wondered if the story could be told with justice.
After reading it, I can say, absolutely yes Taibbi did a fantastic job. While other authors touch upon Garner and lift up similar issues- such as Guiliani's crack down on crime, the rise of loosie's, etc, having that information all in one place was a big help. It led to a fuller story and Taibbi goes into Garner's life a bit more than some other authors do.
This was a tragic read, but a well researched and complete narrative. I am glad I read it.
I gave it 4.5 stars.
*I want to thank NetGalley for the advanced copy. I received it in exchange for an honest review*
This book looks at the incident from all sorts of angles- what was happening at the time leading up to the death, what were the policing policies in place at the time, why was this hold used, etc. Taibbi talks to people that know Garner, people in similar situations, and proves a full account of that day.
I will admit I was a bit hesitant requesting this as a galley. The hesitancy came from the question- can a white guy tell a black man's story and do it well? Taibbi didn't have the experiences that Garner had and even though Taibbi is an incredible journalist, I wondered if the story could be told with justice.
After reading it, I can say, absolutely yes Taibbi did a fantastic job. While other authors touch upon Garner and lift up similar issues- such as Guiliani's crack down on crime, the rise of loosie's, etc, having that information all in one place was a big help. It led to a fuller story and Taibbi goes into Garner's life a bit more than some other authors do.
This was a tragic read, but a well researched and complete narrative. I am glad I read it.
I gave it 4.5 stars.
*I want to thank NetGalley for the advanced copy. I received it in exchange for an honest review*
shannanh's review against another edition
5.0
The day I actually finished the audiobook, was the day Eric's daughter Erica Garner passed. This book told us the story of Eric's life and death, as well as the officer who killed him. You will also see the racial disparities of the area. A very powerful and emotional read.
danicapage's review against another edition
4.0
TW: adult content and profane langauge. Frequent use of "f word"
I remember this story breaking and those close to me saying "that can't have been the whole story" when he was killed for selling illegal cigarettes. People assumed it must have been more.
I knew about this story but not in any real depth. Reading this book was very eye-opening and helped me realize how much I hadn't know about this event. Great accounting.
I remember this story breaking and those close to me saying "that can't have been the whole story" when he was killed for selling illegal cigarettes. People assumed it must have been more.
I knew about this story but not in any real depth. Reading this book was very eye-opening and helped me realize how much I hadn't know about this event. Great accounting.
bleary's review against another edition
5.0
A brilliant, brutal, essential book for life in 2017. It's the story of Eric Garner, a cigarette bootlegger who was choked to death in public by NYPD in 2014, but Taibbi's scope is much broader than that. It's structured like an episode of Law & Order, with the first part looking at the crime and the second dealing with the legal aftermath.
Part one is a biography of Eric Garner and a study of the community around him. Staten Island is effectively segregated with a police force that sometimes seems like an occupying army, and the people of colour in the south part of the island pretty much expect to spend some time inside. Garner, who married and became a stepdad young, tried his hand dealing crack but sucked at it, and eventually turned to selling cigarettes illegally imported from Virgina.
The mundane nature of police violence in south Staten Island is numbing. It's a place where you can be hauled from your car and beaten, or subjected to a full strip search in the middle of the street, or have the money in your pocket taken as evidence and then mysteriously lost on its way to the station. Garner decided he had enough one day and stood up to an officer who accused him of cigarettes when he clearly hadn't been (he had just broken up a fight). Wrong place, wrong time, wrong cop, and an hour later, Eric Garner was dead.
The case was a global sensation and then forgotten when the next atrocity occurred, but that doesn't mean it was over. In fact, the second part of this book is incomplete as so many threads are still awaiting their conclusion: the cop who killed Garner is still on police payroll, and the files from the bizarre grand jury are still sealed.
This second part mostly focuses on Erica, Garner's daughter who continues to push for justice. It reads like a tragic, gruesome version of [b:The Bonfire of the Vanities|2666|The Bonfire of the Vanities|Tom Wolfe|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389856895s/2666.jpg|1080201], with the upper tiers of New York life all trying to manipulate this case to their political advantage and forgetting about the dead black body at the heart of it.
For Taibbi, the cause of death goes beyond corruption in New York. "Eric Garner was killed by history," he says, having examined the nature of 21st century segregation. Cops are not necessarily racist or brutal, he reckons, but they are employed by a system that works to keep whites and non-whites separated, and assumes that anyone who isn't white is inherently lawless.
There's no point in blaming the cops. It's America that's rotten. And it has elected a president that is determined to keep it that way.
Part one is a biography of Eric Garner and a study of the community around him. Staten Island is effectively segregated with a police force that sometimes seems like an occupying army, and the people of colour in the south part of the island pretty much expect to spend some time inside. Garner, who married and became a stepdad young, tried his hand dealing crack but sucked at it, and eventually turned to selling cigarettes illegally imported from Virgina.
The mundane nature of police violence in south Staten Island is numbing. It's a place where you can be hauled from your car and beaten, or subjected to a full strip search in the middle of the street, or have the money in your pocket taken as evidence and then mysteriously lost on its way to the station. Garner decided he had enough one day and stood up to an officer who accused him of cigarettes when he clearly hadn't been (he had just broken up a fight). Wrong place, wrong time, wrong cop, and an hour later, Eric Garner was dead.
The case was a global sensation and then forgotten when the next atrocity occurred, but that doesn't mean it was over. In fact, the second part of this book is incomplete as so many threads are still awaiting their conclusion: the cop who killed Garner is still on police payroll, and the files from the bizarre grand jury are still sealed.
This second part mostly focuses on Erica, Garner's daughter who continues to push for justice. It reads like a tragic, gruesome version of [b:The Bonfire of the Vanities|2666|The Bonfire of the Vanities|Tom Wolfe|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389856895s/2666.jpg|1080201], with the upper tiers of New York life all trying to manipulate this case to their political advantage and forgetting about the dead black body at the heart of it.
For Taibbi, the cause of death goes beyond corruption in New York. "Eric Garner was killed by history," he says, having examined the nature of 21st century segregation. Cops are not necessarily racist or brutal, he reckons, but they are employed by a system that works to keep whites and non-whites separated, and assumes that anyone who isn't white is inherently lawless.
There's no point in blaming the cops. It's America that's rotten. And it has elected a president that is determined to keep it that way.
illyria1013's review against another edition
5.0
The book is an investigative piece that centers around the death of Eric Garner. The first part goes into Garner's back story, how he ended up selling contraband cigarettes on the streets of Staten Island, and all the events that lead up to his death. For those who didn't already know, in order to fulfill campaign promises of not raising taxes elsewhere, cigarettes became the chosen vice to tax heavily to cover budget shortages for the state. The exorbitant price basically created a black market for cigarettes among the denizens of New York.
The second part covers all the key players (attorneys, judges, politicians, police officers etc.) that in some way contributed to the bureaucratic nightmare of bringing to light what happened and how subsequent deaths lead to the proliferation of the Black Lives Matter movement and the eventual countering All Lives Matter group.
Taibbi does an excellent job of covering the various angles and shedding light on some of the political moves that lead to certain laws and political outcomes. While I kept up with the news, there was a lot of stuff I learned that I didn't know before. For instance, the cop who used the illegal chokehold on Garner had a litany of complaints against him for use of excessive force and humiliating tactics like strip searches in clear view of the public.
The author also goes into length about "Broken Windows" and "Stop and Frisk" and how those policy came into being.
I know this book won't be everyone's cup of tea, but for those who want to better understand the events that lead up to Garner's death, all the race politics that surround it, and how those events still permeate current issues, this is a must read.
4.5 stars.
The second part covers all the key players (attorneys, judges, politicians, police officers etc.) that in some way contributed to the bureaucratic nightmare of bringing to light what happened and how subsequent deaths lead to the proliferation of the Black Lives Matter movement and the eventual countering All Lives Matter group.
Taibbi does an excellent job of covering the various angles and shedding light on some of the political moves that lead to certain laws and political outcomes. While I kept up with the news, there was a lot of stuff I learned that I didn't know before. For instance, the cop who used the illegal chokehold on Garner had a litany of complaints against him for use of excessive force and humiliating tactics like strip searches in clear view of the public.
The author also goes into length about "Broken Windows" and "Stop and Frisk" and how those policy came into being.
I know this book won't be everyone's cup of tea, but for those who want to better understand the events that lead up to Garner's death, all the race politics that surround it, and how those events still permeate current issues, this is a must read.
4.5 stars.
nickfourtimes's review against another edition
5.0
1) "In many ways, Garner acted as if his own life and health were permanently damaged and disposable, not worth keeping in repair. All he really cared about was the money he kept flowing to his family. His life was ruined the day he got picked up for selling crack when he was eighteen. Maybe before that. But his kids had an unblemished future, so that's what mattered. And the only way he knew how to show that concern was with money.
Even in his interactions with police, the self-annihilating instinct came through. He was more than willing to go to jail, to sleep in the unventilated, urine-soaked air of the 120th Precinct house, so long as they left his money alone."
2) "In Floyd [v. City of New York], the city suddenly stopped denying that enormous numbers of people were being stopped for no good reason.
Instead, the city introduced two lines of defense. First, they said, Stop-and-Frisk had reduced crime. This was a curious nonanswer to a charge of mass civil rights violations.
More important, the city argued that it was not stopping people because they were black or brown. Instead, they were stopping them because black and brown people were statistically more likely to be criminals.
When asked to justify the fact that in 2011 and 2012, blacks and Hispanics represented 87 percent of all the people stopped, the city's answer was that 'approximately 83 percent of all known crime suspects and approximately 90 percent of all violent crime suspects were Black and Hispanic.'
Therefore, they contended, it was reasonable to be suspicious of the entire group.
This reasonableness also made it legal, by the city's logic, to stop anyone who belonged to those groups. In other words, in a court, before a judge, the city essentially now argued that they had falsified millions of Stop-and-Frisk forms. All of those reasons justifying the searches that the city's cops had cited on official forms countless times—'furtive movements,' 'bulges,' 'inappropriate attire,' etc.—were just convenient euphemisms. In truth, there was a single, blanket justification that covered 'reasonable suspicion' for at least 80 percent of those searches: they were black or Hispanic residents of high-crime neighborhoods.
The city's defense against accusations of profiling was to argue that profiling works."
3) "A large part of the tension between protesters and police lay in the explosive and impossibly complicated argument about race that had long divided the whole country.
On one side sat a group of mostly nonwhite Americans who believed (or knew from personal experience) that institutional racism is still a deathly serious problem in this country, as evidenced by everything from profiling to mass incarceration to sentencing disparities to a massive wealth gap.
On the other side sat an increasingly impatient population of white conservatives that was being squeezed economically (although not nearly as much as black citizens), felt its cultural primacy eroding, and had become hypersensitive to any accusation of racism. These conservatives blamed everything from the welfare state to affirmative action for breeding urban despair and disrespect towards authority—in other words, these conservatives saw themselves as victims of malevolent systems and threatening trends but thought that nonwhite Americans were fully responsible for their own despair."
4) "Meyerson was still waiting for an answer from Judge Garnett after the Staten Island hearing. He didn't seem to be on the edge of his chair in suspense. The outcome seemed predictable. Still, he was troubled. The Garner case had raised thorny questions about what path any attourney should choose to take in a legal system that may not be functioning correctly.
Meyerson talked about a line from a book by Thomas Oliphant called Praying for Gil Hodges, about Jackie Robinson's Dodgers. 'Every important American story is punctuated by race,' the author wrote. Racial tumult is buried deep in the body of American society. Because of slavery and the fallout from it, it is, Meyerson reflected, our original sin. But we're unable to face it.
Like prisoners of ourselves, we seem doomed to repeat patterns over and over. Meyerson talked about the Kerner Commission of the late sixties, convened by LBJ to study the causes of race riots. LBJ had hoped to learn that some instigator or group was conspiring to turn otherwise patriotic black Americans to riots and protest. But the commission found just the opposite.
'The Kerner Commission said that the trigger point [of riots] is that police are viewed as an occupying force in black and brown communities,' he said. 'Fifty years later or forty-five years later, whatever it is, in Ferguson, reports will say the same thing, that police are viewed as an occupying force. Everything's changed and nothing has changed.'"
5) "It struck some people as odd that when America's white supremacist movement finally spilled out into plain view, it would be led not by a gap-toothed southerner but by a rich New Yorker in a power tie. But really it made perfect sense. For ages now New York has been at the center of every innovation in institutional racism, from redlining to blockbusting to the 'war on crack' to mass incarceration to Broken Windows.
Somehow it always comes back to New York."
Even in his interactions with police, the self-annihilating instinct came through. He was more than willing to go to jail, to sleep in the unventilated, urine-soaked air of the 120th Precinct house, so long as they left his money alone."
2) "In Floyd [v. City of New York], the city suddenly stopped denying that enormous numbers of people were being stopped for no good reason.
Instead, the city introduced two lines of defense. First, they said, Stop-and-Frisk had reduced crime. This was a curious nonanswer to a charge of mass civil rights violations.
More important, the city argued that it was not stopping people because they were black or brown. Instead, they were stopping them because black and brown people were statistically more likely to be criminals.
When asked to justify the fact that in 2011 and 2012, blacks and Hispanics represented 87 percent of all the people stopped, the city's answer was that 'approximately 83 percent of all known crime suspects and approximately 90 percent of all violent crime suspects were Black and Hispanic.'
Therefore, they contended, it was reasonable to be suspicious of the entire group.
This reasonableness also made it legal, by the city's logic, to stop anyone who belonged to those groups. In other words, in a court, before a judge, the city essentially now argued that they had falsified millions of Stop-and-Frisk forms. All of those reasons justifying the searches that the city's cops had cited on official forms countless times—'furtive movements,' 'bulges,' 'inappropriate attire,' etc.—were just convenient euphemisms. In truth, there was a single, blanket justification that covered 'reasonable suspicion' for at least 80 percent of those searches: they were black or Hispanic residents of high-crime neighborhoods.
The city's defense against accusations of profiling was to argue that profiling works."
3) "A large part of the tension between protesters and police lay in the explosive and impossibly complicated argument about race that had long divided the whole country.
On one side sat a group of mostly nonwhite Americans who believed (or knew from personal experience) that institutional racism is still a deathly serious problem in this country, as evidenced by everything from profiling to mass incarceration to sentencing disparities to a massive wealth gap.
On the other side sat an increasingly impatient population of white conservatives that was being squeezed economically (although not nearly as much as black citizens), felt its cultural primacy eroding, and had become hypersensitive to any accusation of racism. These conservatives blamed everything from the welfare state to affirmative action for breeding urban despair and disrespect towards authority—in other words, these conservatives saw themselves as victims of malevolent systems and threatening trends but thought that nonwhite Americans were fully responsible for their own despair."
4) "Meyerson was still waiting for an answer from Judge Garnett after the Staten Island hearing. He didn't seem to be on the edge of his chair in suspense. The outcome seemed predictable. Still, he was troubled. The Garner case had raised thorny questions about what path any attourney should choose to take in a legal system that may not be functioning correctly.
Meyerson talked about a line from a book by Thomas Oliphant called Praying for Gil Hodges, about Jackie Robinson's Dodgers. 'Every important American story is punctuated by race,' the author wrote. Racial tumult is buried deep in the body of American society. Because of slavery and the fallout from it, it is, Meyerson reflected, our original sin. But we're unable to face it.
Like prisoners of ourselves, we seem doomed to repeat patterns over and over. Meyerson talked about the Kerner Commission of the late sixties, convened by LBJ to study the causes of race riots. LBJ had hoped to learn that some instigator or group was conspiring to turn otherwise patriotic black Americans to riots and protest. But the commission found just the opposite.
'The Kerner Commission said that the trigger point [of riots] is that police are viewed as an occupying force in black and brown communities,' he said. 'Fifty years later or forty-five years later, whatever it is, in Ferguson, reports will say the same thing, that police are viewed as an occupying force. Everything's changed and nothing has changed.'"
5) "It struck some people as odd that when America's white supremacist movement finally spilled out into plain view, it would be led not by a gap-toothed southerner but by a rich New Yorker in a power tie. But really it made perfect sense. For ages now New York has been at the center of every innovation in institutional racism, from redlining to blockbusting to the 'war on crack' to mass incarceration to Broken Windows.
Somehow it always comes back to New York."
jenno's review against another edition
5.0
Do yourself a favor and read this, if you haven't already.
It's a hard read but a necessary one.
Read it. Give it to a friend. Talk about it. React.
Eric Gardner isn't a symbol but a real person that was killed by police.
Might write more some, and I'm so glad I took the time to read this slowly to take everything in. Taibbi does an excellent job of taking in all angles and perspective. It's been hard to read. And trying. But I wouldn't take it back for the world.
It's a hard read but a necessary one.
Read it. Give it to a friend. Talk about it. React.
Eric Gardner isn't a symbol but a real person that was killed by police.
Might write more some, and I'm so glad I took the time to read this slowly to take everything in. Taibbi does an excellent job of taking in all angles and perspective. It's been hard to read. And trying. But I wouldn't take it back for the world.
hotlizard's review against another edition
5.0
As enraging as it is galvanizing, we are faced with a picture of Eric Garner through the eyes of all those who've crossed paths one way or another. A picture of a flawed man, who lived for his family with every choice he'd made. A picture of an insidious and iron-clad legal+law enforcement system that allows for dangerous officers to continue beating unarmed men despite even internal calls to remove them. A must-read for everyone.