Word: atticas
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...Wicker was an evewitness during most of the four days' uprising at Attica. The inmates knew of him as a New York Times columnist who offer supported civil rights and prison reform in his writing. And they requested that he and 13 others, including radical lawyer William Kunstler and Black Panther Party leader Bobby Scale, form an observers' committee through which the inmates might negotiate with the state. Four years later the Grand Jury has finished its work, and Wicker anger and despair have culminated in A Time To Die, his personal chronicle of the Attica weekend September 9 through...
...addition to his minute by minute account of the perceptions, tensions negotiations, and rhetoric on all sides at Attica Wicker presents his autobiography. It serves as a perfect corollats to the grim recital of events and speeches. When he needs to express the observers and inmates in tense fears of a police assault for instance, he tells a story from his childhood. Sitting on his front porch one hot summer evening, he felt an eerie tingle in his backbone, a rasping ominous sound that grew and grabbed his ears and shrieked Wicker was petrified with fear even after...
...ATTICA CAME at a turning point in Wicker's life. His marriage was breaking up, a shattering of stability he had come to depend upon. He was fat, 45, and frustrated in his ambition to be a great writer. Indeed, he was afraid that nothing he had ever written would last, that in his columns he was preaching only to those already converted. His aloof, critical onlooker's ethic, valid professionally, no longer could sustain his life. As he himself says, in the third-person prose that achieves objectivity. "His sense of self had finally required of him that...
...Wicker went to Attica as a writer who had asked a few searching questions about his society, but who essentially was loyal to and protective of that society. He came away from Attica's tragedy shaken, stirred, and aware personally for the first time of the depth of racism that lay in his Southern upbringing, of the inhumanity of prisons, of America's reliance on violence as the ultimate recourse, of the power of guns to dictate men's actions...
...Before Attica he had experienced only twinges of these feelings, as when he saw the tanks grinding through his town. Even at the first road-block on his way to Attica, he felt only a momentary shock when he noted the excessive weaponry--sidearms, rifles, shotguns, tear-gas launchers--that the sheriff's deputies and state troopers were carrying...