Word: islanded
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...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...
...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," writes Hooper, and "booze and loathing" fill the stifling air. Hurley, she acknowledges, was impressive on the stand: "He seemed grave. He seemed sincere. He really could have been an old screen idol...
...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...
...Robben Island, Mandela would always include in his brain trust men he neither liked nor relied on. One person he became close to was Chris Hani, the fiery chief of staff of the ANC's military wing. There were some who thought Hani was conspiring against Mandela, but Mandela cozied up to him. "It wasn't just Hani," says Ramaphosa. "It was also the big industrialists, the mining families, the opposition. He would pick up the phone and call them on their birthdays. He would go to family funerals. He saw it as an opportunity." When Mandela emerged from prison...
...Ultimately, the key to understanding Mandela is those 27 years in prison. The man who walked onto Robben Island in 1964 was emotional, headstrong, easily stung. The man who emerged was balanced and disciplined. He is not and never has been introspective. I often asked him how the man who emerged from prison differed from the willful young man who had entered it. He hated this question. Finally, in exasperation one day, he said, "I came out mature." There is nothing so rare - or so valuable - as a mature man. Happy birthday, Madiba...