I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street

I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street

A work of riveting literary journalism that explores the roots and repercussions of the infamous killing of Eric Garner by the New York City policeâ€”from the bestselling author of The Divide
Â
NAMED ONE OF THE TOP 10 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 Garnerâ€™s life were captured on video and seen by millions. His agonized last words, â€œI canâ€™t breathe,â€ 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.
Â
Matt Taibbiâ€™s deeply reported retelling of these events liberates Eric Garner from the abstractions of newspaper accounts and lets us see the man in fullâ€”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.Â
Â
In America, no miscarriage of justice exists in isolation, of course, and in I Canâ€™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, Taibbiâ€™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.Â
Â
A masterly narrative of urban America and a scathing indictment of the perverse incentives built into our penal system, I Canâ€™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.

â€œBrilliant . . . Taibbi is unsparing is his excoriation of the system, police, and courts. . . . This is a necessary and riveting work.â€â€”Booklist (starred review)

Country	USA
Author	Matt Taibbi
Binding	Kindle Edition
EISBN	9780812988864
Format	Kindle eBook
Label	Spiegel & Grau
Manufacturer	Spiegel & Grau
NumberOfPages	336
PublicationDate	2017-10-24
Publisher	Spiegel & Grau
ReleaseDate	2017-10-24
Studio	Spiegel & Grau

I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street

You might also like...