Word: hooper
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Restraint is a quality seldom lauded except in its absence. Several of the protagonists in Chloe Hooper's compelling second book clearly lack it. The author, by contrast, has it in spades. Hooper's account of the real-life events surrounding the death in custody of an Aboriginal man nearly four years ago is the more powerful for her not making explicit all of her conclusions about the case. Without these in the way, the reader's own feelings have room to grow. Anger and sadness coalesce into something like despair: in 21st century Australia, how could this story have...
...Tall Man (Penguin; 276 pages) - Hooper's follow-up to the successful novel A Child's Book of True Crime - begins with the death of 36-year-old Cameron Doomadgee, a member of the 2,500-strong Aboriginal community on Queensland's Palm Island. On Nov. 19, 2004, Doomadgee was arrested for allegedly swearing at police officers. Some 40 minutes later, he lay dead in a cell with a black eye, bruising to his head, body and hands, four broken ribs, a ruptured portal vein and a split liver. The only suspect was Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, whom Queensland...
...would have been easy for Hooper to make The Tall Man a simple story of apparent injustice, to portray Doomadgee - with whose lawyers and family she spent a great deal of time - as a wholly likable victim and Hurley as a thug. Always, however, she favors nuance over cliché, context over judgment. The book's title is partly a reference to Hurley, a 2-m-tall career cop who had been decorated for bravery and eschewed comfortable postings for trouble spots like Palm Island, a former open-air Aboriginal jail where "the heat attacks like a swarm of insects...
...While absorbed in the black and white of guilt or innocence, Hooper is also drawn to the gray. Conscious of being a middle-class author residing in a cosmopolitan city, she doesn't pretend to know much about the realities of law enforcement on an eerie powder keg like Palm Island. Must notions of good and evil, she wonders, necessarily blur in such a dysfunctional, desperate place? In a community of extreme violence, are those charged with keeping order forced to be violent...
...Undecided Hanover voter Jane Hooper, who caught up with Obama in Lebanon, is weighing a choice today between him and John Edwards. "Who knows what he can do when he gets in there," she said. But she liked what she heard: "He's fresh and we need something like that...