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I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street Paperback – September 4, 2018
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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)
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateSeptember 4, 2018
- Dimensions5.21 x 0.71 x 7.98 inches
- ISBN-10081298885X
- ISBN-13978-0812988857
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“[A] brilliant work of narrative nonfiction . . . [Matt] Taibbi is unsparing is his excoriation of the system, police, and courts that led to the fatal choke hold and worked to blur the abuse afterward. . . . This is a necessary and riveting work.”—Booklist (starred review)
“[A] searing exposé . . . After deeply exploring Garner’s life from a variety of perspectives, Taibbi offers detailed reporting about the out-of-control Staten Island police officers present at the death scene . . . [and] the futile efforts of the Garner family to achieve posthumous justice. . . . What emerges from the author’s superb reporting and vivid writing is a tragically revealing look at a broken criminal justice system geared to serve white citizens while often overlooking or ignoring the rights of others.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Matt Taibbi’s I Can’t Breathe marries the best instincts of explanatory narrative journalism with uncompromising moral clarity. The result is a riveting walk through decades of policing policy and big city politics that culminated, seemingly inevitably, in Eric Garner’s killing by the New York Police Department. While he may have set out to document a fatal injustice, the tale Taibbi tells is not one of a death, but one of a life. In capturing the fullness of Garner’s ‘imperfect humanity,’ I Can’t Breathe adds a vital account of police violence and a vivid exploration of its lingering costs. Taibbi, through thorough reporting and captivating writing, captures the totality of an American tragedy.”—Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize–winning national correspondent for The Washington Post and author of the New York Times bestselling They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Bang bang bang!
At about 2:45 p.m. on April 2, 2014, on a drizzly afternoon in Staten Island, New York, an aspiring music producer in his late thirties named Ibrahim Annan was sitting in his car when a noise outside startled him.
“Open the fucking window!”
Tall and slender, with a slim mustache, Annan, known as Brian or B or Bizzy B to his friends, was the son of two devout Muslim Ghanaian immigrants. On this afternoon, he was parked on private property, a muddy driveway in front of a friend’s apartment building. The noise came from the driver’s side of his spiffily maintained 2011 Toyota Camry.
Annan looked up and saw a white man with a hoodie obscuring most of his face, rapping on the window.
Bang bang bang!
“Open the fucking window before I break your fucking arm!”
Annan looked past his dashboard and saw another figure standing at about ten o’clock, also dressed in street clothes. This one was aiming a gun at him.
Annan froze. He was a regular visitor to this address, 100 Pierce Street, on the northern side of the island. It’s a dull three-story apartment building, nestled in a sleepy mixed-race neighborhood of run-down one-family homes. He had a key to an apartment there belonging to his friend, a local DJ known as Icebox International. The two sometimes mixed music inside. He would later say he was there that day to visit his friend on the way back from the post office.
The police version of this story is different. They say Ibrahim Annan pulled into the parking spot and immediately began ostentatiously playing around in his front seat with a giant baggie of weed, which they would describe in a criminal complaint as a “ziplock bag of marihuana.”
This “ziplock bag” in the complaint was described as being “open to public view.” By unsurprising coincidence, New York City police are not supposed to arrest people for marijuana possession unless the subject is “publicly displaying” the drug. If you’re carrying it or even smoking it in private, it’s just a ticket. But at the time, tens of thousands of New Yorkers were criminally arrested for pot possession every year, which either pointed to an epidemic of exhibitionist drug use or a lot of iffy police reports.
Bang bang bang!
“OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!”
A dependable rule of thumb in police brutality cases is that the worst incidents are triggered by something the suspect says. A lot of these episodes are already running hot before they fully erupt. They often start with the police tackling someone, putting a knee in his or her back, hurling obscenities (to be fair, sometimes in retaliation for obscenities thrown at them). So it doesn’t take much to raise the collective temperature beyond the bursting point. An F-bomb or two will usually do it.
Annan yelled back: “Get a fucking warrant!”
Boom! The inside of Annan’s car exploded with glass as the officer in the hoodie used something—a nightstick maybe?—to shatter the driver’s-side window. At the hospital later on, Annan would have glass fragments removed from his eyes.
Annan turned his face to the right to avoid the impact. But when he opened his eyes, he was immediately struck on the left side of his face with what he thought was an ASP, a kind of telescoping metal baton used by police all over the country.
Another policeman had opened the passenger-side door and was also striking him repeatedly with something. He heard the impact of steel on his skull before he felt it.
Meanwhile the original officer in the hoodie was yanking at his seat belt. The Toyota dealership would later have to replace the seat belt lock, which is designed to withstand car accidents. It was broken and ripped loose in the struggle.
After more than twenty blows to his face and head, Annan was pulled from the car and thrown to the ground. A police cruiser had driven up beside his car, and he was now facedown in the mud and glass, obscured in a narrow spot between two vehicles. Annan says he screamed for bystanders behind the cars to reach for their cellphones.
“Film them!” he screamed. “Film them!”
“Shut the fuck up!”
“Film them!”
Hands pulled behind his back, Annan felt a set of cuffs go on. Officers were raining blows down on him from all angles. He detected a strange sensation in his left leg and tried to protest.
“Yo, hey, the ankle cuff is too tight!” he gasped.
“What are you talking about?”
“The cuff on my ankle! It’s too tight!”
In fact, there was no cuff on his ankle. Annan’s left leg had been stomped on repeatedly, broken in three places, the damage so severe he would still be walking with a cane more than a year later.
Annan tried to focus. He looked down at the mud in front of him. The blows were coming so furiously that he began to worry that he would die here, in this coffin-sized space between two cars.
His legs and wrists were throbbing and now he also felt something, a hand maybe, sliding under his neck, preparing maybe for a headlock. In his panic he felt himself losing air and spoke three words destined to become famous in another man’s mouth.
“I can’t breathe,” he said.
“Shut the fuck up.”
“I’m serious. I can’t breathe!”
One of the officers answered him: “You can fucking talk, you can fucking breathe.”
In the ambulance a few minutes after his beating, Annan was beside himself. He looked at his mangled left foot and nodded at the officer.
“Where do you live?” he shouted. “Identify yourself!”
The cop shook his head, then leaned forward and punched Annan in the face.
The EMT in the front of the vehicle said nothing and kept driving.
The borough of Staten Island would later charge Annan seven hundred dollars for the ambulance ride.
Ibrahim Annan was well known to the staff of the Richmond University Medical Center. He and his sister both suffered from sickle cell anemia and had come there regularly for treatment their whole lives.
Now Annan was pushed through the door of the ER on a gurney. He was shouting, hysterically, at the top of his lungs.
“They attacked me and broke my leg! Don’t let them hurt me! Don’t let them hurt me!”
“Shut up,” one of the officers muttered.
Annan’s gurney was moved to a private room. Inside, the hospital staff implored him to keep his mouth shut. He was eventually handcuffed to his bed and then wheeled off to a far corner of the ER.
Much later in the evening, after word of his detention had finally reached his family, Annan’s youngest sister, Mariama, wandered through the emergency room, looking for her brother.
Mariama caught a glimpse of him from afar, his face bloodied and his leg smashed. “I had never seen him like that before,” she said. “It was awful.”
The police wouldn’t let her or anyone else in the family visit him or even learn exactly what had happened, so she had to steal a glance from a distance.
“The incident completely changed the way I think about everything—the government, the police, everything,” she said later. “I didn’t trust the nurses because they were following the police instructions. I was afraid to leave him there with any of them.”
Annan’s parents also tried to get access to Ibrahim. It took more than a full day and multiple trips back and forth to Staten Island’s infamous 120th Precinct before the two slow-moving, elderly Africans were finally given a pass to see their son. As immigrants they had a poor instinct for the uglier nuances of American culture and were puzzled by every part of the process.
The deal for the pass had been brokered by Mariama. She pleaded with a desk sergeant at the 120th Precinct, an outpost that had for decades been the subject of horror stories within the island’s nonwhite community, who refer to it darkly as the “One Two Oh.”
On the street in certain parts of Staten Island, people believe the 120 is where they send all the reject cops from other precincts, especially the ones with too many abuse complaints. The precinct jailhouse in particular has a terrible reputation for, among other things, its smell and poor ventilation. Even hardened criminals go the extra mile to try to avoid landing there, even for a night.
Mariama remembers the moment when she got the pass. She was standing in the precinct with her two parents when finally, the desk man shook his head and sighed.
“Okay, I’ll give them a pass,” he said. “But only because they’re fucking old.”
Mariama nearly fainted.
“I was afraid for my parents,” she said later. “They were shocked by the language. These are elderly, proper people. They could have had a heart attack.”
After a bedside arraignment in the hospital, Ibrahim Annan faced a litany of charges: menacing, criminal possession of marijuana in the fifth degree, obstructing government administration, unlawful possession of marijuana, assault in the second degree, and assault in the third degree, among others.
Annan’s family later hired a tall, sharply dressed African American lawyer named Gregory Watts. He would grumblingly describe the charges of assaulting the police.
“They smashed the guy’s car window, and one of them got a little cut after they beat his ass up,” he said. “That’s the assault.”
The last charge was criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree. The police explanation for that charge is that when they banged on Ibrahim Annan’s car window, the accused responded by holding up a lighter and an aerosol can and shouting at armed police from inside a closed vehicle, “IF YOU OPEN THE WINDOW I’M GOING TO BURN YOU.” The officers used all caps in the complaint. Annan would later claim he never even read that part of the charges. “I said what?” he asked, incredulous.
The long list of charges slapped on Annan were part of an elaborate game police and prosecutors often play with people caught up in “problematic” arrests. A black man with a shattered leg has a virtually automatic argument for certain kinds of federal civil rights lawsuits. But those suits are harder to win when the arrest results in a conviction. So when police beat someone badly enough, the city’s first line of defense is often to go on offense and file a long list of charges, hoping one will stick. Civil lawyers meanwhile will often try to wait until the criminal charges are beaten before they file suit.
It’s a leverage game. If the beating is on the severe side, the victim has the power to take the city for a decent sum of money. But that’s just money, and it comes out of the taxpayer’s pocket. The state, meanwhile, has the power to make the losses in this particular poker game very personal. It can put the loser in jail and on the way there can take up years of his or her life in court appearances. As Annan would find out, time is the state’s ultimate trump card.
Annan was in the hospital for more than three weeks. His ankle had to be reconstructed surgically.
When he finally went home, he was mostly immobile. It was spring outside, and he missed seeing the weather turn warm.
Feeling better one day in the beginning of May, however, he decided to get some fresh air. With the aid of a walker, he went outside and headed down toward Bay Street, near the water.
The big man in the doorway saw everything. He knew this part of the island like the back of his hand. Anything in this little crisscrossed city block that looked or felt out of place, he registered instantly.
If you judged this man by his clothes, you missed a lot. He looked a mess from the outside. He’d change T-shirts every day, but the giant XXL sweatpants were often the same smudged and stained pair from the day before. The big man suffered from sleep apnea and chronic allergies, which left his nose constantly running. A hundred times a day or more, he’d wipe his nose with his fingers, then wipe his fingers on those sweatpants.
Eric Garner’s one recent concession to fashion was a pair of shell-toe Adidas sneakers, made iconic in New York by Run-DMC, a band he was crazy for as a kid growing up in Brooklyn. His sneakers were huge—size 16—and yet still too small for him, because he also suffered from diabetes and his swollen feet spilled out of his shoes.
Some of his friends on the street called him “Elephant Foot.” But it really wasn’t that funny. The swelling from his illnesses left him in constant pain, which was a problem because his job required him to stand in place, rain or shine, hot summer or biting winter, for as much as ten or twelve hours a day.
His usual place of work was on a little stretch of Bay Street, on Staten Island’s North Shore. He spent most of his time there, circling a small triangular patch of trash-strewn grass called Tompkinsville Park. The park, which used to be nicknamed Needle Park, contains a dozen or so benches, a big red brick public toilet building long ago locked up by authorities, and a view of New York’s Upper Bay. On most days it’s also home to a collection of dope fiends, drifters, crackheads, and alcoholics. They come here to hang out, get high, drink, argue, and trash-talk.
Just a hundred yards or so from this crowd, on the water side of the park, sits a new fifty-seven-unit condominium complex bearing the absurdly pretentious name “The Pointe at St. George.”
“The Pointe” is part of a major Staten Island renewal project called the Bay Street corridor, an ambitious plan to invest nearly a billion dollars in a string of high-end residential buildings that would dot the waterfront leading to the Staten Island Ferry. A two-bedroom unit at the “luxury, full-service” condo complex sells for half a million dollars or more. A nice starter home for an entry-level Wall Street hustler, perhaps, who wants a water view at night and doesn’t mind reading the Financial Times on a morning ferry ride to downtown Manhattan.
The condos looked like great investments but for one thing: the view across the street. Needle Park is an old-school New York street hangout—not too dangerous, but visually rough around the edges and definitely way too black for anyone who’d spend a half-million dollars to spell “Point” with an “e.”
When this place was just a straight-up shooting gallery in the early 2000s, police hardly ever came by. But now that the park was on the edge of a billion-dollar real estate investment, the police were always coming around, mixing it up with the park’s denizens over one thing or another. Nickel-and-dime stuff, mostly, what the police call “quality of life” arrests: drinking from open containers, peeing on the sidewalk, disorderly conduct.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; Reprint edition (September 4, 2018)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 081298885X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0812988857
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.21 x 0.71 x 7.98 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #698,480 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #404 in Poverty
- #798 in Sociology of Class
- #5,921 in Sociology Reference
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Matt Taibbi, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Divide, Griftopia, and The Great Derangement, is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and winner of the 2007 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers praise the book for its engaging writing style and well-researched content. They find the story compelling and eye-opening, providing a comprehensive look at the tragedy from multiple angles. The author's integrity is also appreciated, as he builds his case solidly and eloquently. While some readers find the story tragic and emotional to read, others describe it as heartbreaking and hard to put down.
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Customers find the book easy to read and engaging. They say it's a must-read and the author does a good job of explaining social dynamics.
"...is a little denser than some of Matt's other works, but he does a brilliant job of showing how a social structure/institution, one that we have..." Read more
"...Highly recommended book -- I was left stunned about just how little I knew about systemic large scale racism in the US...." Read more
"...Excellent research and reporting by the author. Must read." Read more
"This is a “Must read“ book...." Read more
Customers find the writing engaging and unique. They appreciate the author's solid case-building and excellent commentary.
"...This was a very well written and well researched book...." Read more
"...Written lively and with high integrity. And not long ago we were told by Supreme Court mandarins that we live in a post-racial society......" Read more
"...His writing is so easily readable and he makes a subject that could become tedious compelling, literally a page turner. One of my favorite authors." Read more
"...He is a captivating writer who can tell stories with a unique approach that is suspenseful and a page turner!" Read more
Customers appreciate the book's research and reporting quality. They find the book well-researched, with a depth of investigation and character development. The writing is described as perceptive, disturbing, and an excellent work of journalism.
"...This was a very well written and well researched book...." Read more
"This is a superb work of journalism, all the more so because it was written by a white reporter who had to move way out of his comfort zone to write..." Read more
"A well researched and documented continuing racism on a massive scale in the US. Written lively and with high integrity...." Read more
"...Taibbi is a brilliant writer and one of the best investigative reports left standing...." Read more
Customers find the book's storytelling engaging. They appreciate the author's unique approach and its portrayal of the real-life story of Eric Garner. The book provides a disturbing look into the racism that led to his death.
"...It then does a deep look into the life, friends, and family of the man giving us a balanced picture of and sense for who he was and the impact of..." Read more
"A well researched and documented continuing racism on a massive scale in the US. Written lively and with high integrity...." Read more
"This book tells the story of Eric, not as a statistic or martyr or political device, but as a real human being who was a flawed and as gifted as any..." Read more
"...He is a captivating writer who can tell stories with a unique approach that is suspenseful and a page turner!" Read more
Customers find the book heartbreaking and eye-opening. They appreciate the writer's perspective from all angles of this American tragedy.
"...It is heartbreaking, but also eye opening. It is too easy to view these incidents in isolation. I did...." Read more
"Taibbi is a great writer and gives a view from all angles of this American tragedy. You are almost transported into another part of our America" Read more
"Eye opening. Amazing!..." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's integrity. They say it builds its case solidly and eloquently, and is a well-researched, well-supported indictment of the structure.
"...Written lively and with high integrity. And not long ago we were told by Supreme Court mandarins that we live in a post-racial society......" Read more
"...It is also a well researched, well supported indictment of the structure of the police force, a structure build on laws, policies, political..." Read more
"Taibbi is strident and angry, but he builds his case solidly and eloquently...." Read more
Customers have different views on the story. Some find it heartbreaking and emotional to read, while others describe it as eye-opening and sobering.
"...Very sad." Read more
"...It is heartbreaking, but also eye opening. It is too easy to view these incidents in isolation. I did...." Read more
"This was real life and so tragic. It was well written and I learneda lot about life in a poor Area of Staten Island." Read more
"...Yet one must read and be touched by its tortured, continual and tragic reality...." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2021This book starts out describing the events that led to the tragic killing of Eric Gardner. It then does a deep look into the life, friends, and family of the man giving us a balanced picture of and sense for who he was and the impact of both his life and his killing at the hands of police officers. Matt Taibbi then goes into detail of the legal system band the machinations that have so far led to their being nit even a semblance of justice for Mr. Garner and his family. The end of the book may have you looking into your own psyche afterwards to confront any potential racism divide within yourself. Hopefully, with honest, raw assessment of the injustices done in this country due to our denial how racial discrimination is a baked in feature to our current American society will help us ultimately confront and overcome fears and hate that keep rising up and dividing us from each other.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2024I've watched a lot of Matt Taibbi's reporting but have never actually read any of his stuff. This was a very well written and well researched book. I live in NY and forgot a lot of the details about the case and knew nothing about who Eric Garner actually was on a personal level. Would highly recommend to anyone.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2024I bought the book to be uncomfortable, it did its job. It could use updating and a little less preaching. I struggle with lifelong criminals pedestaled as victims.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2018I've liked pretty much everything Matt Taibbi has written, but this one was/is one of his best. Full disclosure, I am a criminology professor, and this is is a little denser than some of Matt's other works, but he does a brilliant job of showing how a social structure/institution, one that we have given so much power to in our laws, how they can impact us as individuals, in this case tragically for one person- Eric Garner. It is heartbreaking, but also eye opening. It is too easy to view these incidents in isolation. I did. I looked at the officers, what could have been done differently, and was horrified. What I should have done, and what Taibbi did, was take a step back and look at the system, and not just look at the system and how it failed, but look at what happened with that system over time and what led up to that moment.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2020This is a superb work of journalism, all the more so because it was written by a white reporter who had to move way out of his comfort zone to write it. By Taibbi’s own admission it was a painful journey, but one that gave voice to those who knew and loved Eric Garner, and to those who understand from first hand experience the racism that leads to the death of Black men at the hands of white police. Taibbi makes the case that the police are actually doing the job of the white-dominated society that wants men like Garner to disappear.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2017In the days of faketubes, Twi(a)tbooks, blogs and other such nonsense I found myself asking recently, quite often, I must admit: how the **** did we end up here. With clickbaity headlines, advertorials, 24hour breaking news cycle and presidential decrees delivered 140 characters at a time I have to conclude that media is broken. (Coincidentally, for more detailed description of symptoms I would suggest Insane Clown President). It is not broken because Wolf's latest graphic is less glizy than the last, or because Anderson Cooper suddenly started to age, or because John Stewart quit but Tucker is still on TV. No, it's deeper than that, it's the fact that we all know deep inside that what we are told is not the whole truth, a facet that we choose to agree or disagree with, yes, but not the full picture. We accept that politicians and media figures lie to make the point that is currently more convenient. Meanwhile the whole truth and the problems we face are hard, complex, usually grey, and most certainly not advertiser friendly.
I don't know if there is will or courage or place to save journalism. But if you forgot what real reporting looks like, with all the complexity and nuance and context of the story: read "I can't breathe".
- Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2017A well researched and documented continuing racism on a massive scale in the US. Written lively and with high integrity. And not long ago we were told by Supreme Court mandarins that we live in a post-racial society...
I listened to this outstanding in-depth analysis in Audible format -- which was well narrated
Highly recommended book -- I was left stunned about just how little I knew about systemic large scale racism in the US. A meat-grinding machine about which white people like me are completely unaware
- Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2020I thought I knew something about the recurring police brutality problems, but this book peeled back layers that I was completely unaware of about life in racist America. Taibbi is a brilliant writer and one of the best investigative reports left standing. His writing is so easily readable and he makes a subject that could become tedious compelling, literally a page turner. One of my favorite authors.
Top reviews from other countries
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Maurício Fontana FilhoReviewed in Brazil on November 16, 2020
4.0 out of 5 stars Serve para que pesquisa sobre o assunto
Essa obra não é um romance, mas um produto de pesquisa com foco na morte de Eric Garner. A menos que estejas a pesquisar e produzir material acadêmico na temática, não faria sentido adquirir a obra.
- BrookepReviewed in Canada on May 14, 2019
1.0 out of 5 stars Poor condition.
Damaged. Bought as a gift.
Can't give it like this.
Brookep
Reviewed in Canada on May 14, 2019
Can't give it like this.
Images in this review - Rae (They/Them)Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 1, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Everyone should read this
Honestly, this book is one of many that are so important to read. I was shocked by some of the things that happened and it definitely impacted my view of America and even the world and how much people are treated differently because of their race.
Racism and discrimination was a problem for hundreds of generations, it's still a problem now in 2020 and it needs to end. People need to wake up and realise that the world we live in is a world that needs to change for three whether and for good.
- Professor SteveReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 17, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars Everyone should read this book
Fantastic book about Eric Garner and the Black Lives Matter movement. Beautifully written, thoroughly researched. It's movingly personal in terms of the way we get to know Garner and his family, through their words and stories, but also shines a bright light on the tangled institutional politics of New York, its police force and court system -- which have allowed Garner's killers to get away, quite literally, with murder. Taibbi also shows how the current police regime has its roots in the flawed sociological notion of "Broken Windows theory" - which becomes accidentally racist precisely by not talking about race.
- The IrishmanReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 19, 2021
4.0 out of 5 stars Very insightful
If you want to get an insight as to where BLM comes from or the reality of broken police policies, this book is for you.