Review by Booklist Review
In 1969, the Chicago police, on the instructions of an overzealous state's attorney, raided a West Side apartment and killed Fred Hampton, the leader of the Chicago Black Panthers. Haas, a young attorney and a founder of People's Law Office, fought for years after Hampton's killing to bring the police and the state's attorney to justice for what looked like a pre-dawn assassination of a man as he lay sleeping. Haas recounts the life of Fred Hampton, a community activist radicalized by the antiwar and Black Power movements, who gained a spot on the FBI's Key Agitator Index. Haas draws parallels with his own upbringing in Atlanta's upper-middle-class Jewish community, witnessing discrimination but doing nothing to challenge it until he came to Chicago. Haas chronicles the events leading to Hampton's assassination and the aftermath, the years of investigation, and the discovery of a connection between the Chicago police action and the FBI investigation of black leaders. Photographs and partial transcripts from the trial of the police and state's attorney add to the immediacy of this riveting look at a turbulent time.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
On December 4, 1969, Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was shot dead in his bed during a police raid. Hass and his law partner, Flint Taylor of the perpetually underfunded People's Law Office, spent the next decade fighting a well-financed opposition team and a hostile judge to prove that Hampton had been shot not in self-defense, as the police advocates claimed, but as the result of an FBI assassination The dramatic David and Goliath struggle embodies many of the era's fiercest debates, but Haas lacks the skill to transmute his experience into compelling reading. The prose is studded with cliches, and nearly every physical description reads like a checklist: age, size, build, skin color and length of Afro. Hass strays from the narrative to relate irrelevant information about his personal life, as when he recollects that his third wife first captured his attention when she "propped her red, calf-length boots" on his desk. The book is most engaging when Hass offers a straightforward account of the legal process, a testament to the power of the story-not the author's proficiency. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
