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NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST
On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk after a police officer put him in what has been described as an illegal chokehold during an arrest for selling bootleg cigarettes. The final moments of Garner’s life were captured on video and seen by millions. His agonized last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter protest movement. A grand jury ultimately declined to indict the officer who wrestled Garner to the pavement.
Matt Taibbi’s deeply reported retelling of these events liberates Eric Garner from the abstractions of newspaper accounts and lets us see the man in full—with all his flaws and contradictions intact. A husband and father with a complicated personal history, Garner was neither villain nor victim, but a fiercely proud individual determined to do the best he could for his family, bedeviled by bad luck, and ultimately subdued by forces beyond his control.
In America, no miscarriage of justice exists in isolation, of course, and in I Can’t Breathe Taibbi also examines the conditions that made this tragedy possible. Featuring vivid vignettes of life on the street and inside our Kafkaesque court system, Taibbi’s kaleidoscopic account illuminates issues around policing, mass incarceration, the underground economy, and racial disparity in law enforcement. No one emerges unsullied, from the conservative district attorney who half-heartedly prosecutes the case to the progressive mayor caught between the demands of outraged activists and the foot-dragging of recalcitrant police officials.
A masterly narrative of urban America and a scathing indictment of the perverse incentives built into our penal system, I Can’t Breathe drills down into the particulars of one case to confront us with the human cost of our broken approach to dispensing criminal justice.
“Brilliant . . . Taibbi is unsparing is his excoriation of the system, police, and courts. . . . This is a necessary and riveting work.”—Booklist (starred review)
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 24, 2017 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780735288164
- File size: 370027 KB
- Duration: 12:50:53
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Police brutality against African-Americans is depressingly common, but the 2014 case of Eric Garner was in a class by itself. A cell phone video captured his dying gasps--"I can't breathe"--as he was trapped in a choke hold by a police officer. Narrator Dominic Hoffman's gravelly timbre and tough tone are an ideal fit for this outstanding piece of journalism. There is a lot of dialogue here--a testament to Taibbi's outstanding reporting--and Hoffman expertly characterizes New York and African-American speech without slipping into caricature. He also manages to capture Taibbi's dark and occasionally sarcastic humor when recounting the injustice of the Garner case and others like it. The account loses some steam in the final couple of hours, but the slow denouement won't be enough to defuse the anger listeners will feel at the end of this powerful narrative. D.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
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