Word: zebras
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NONFICTION: African Calliope, Edward Hoagland ∙The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff∙ The Intricate Music, Thomas Kiernan∙The Medusa and the Snail, Lewis Thomas ∙The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe ∙The White Album, Joan Didion ∙Zebra, Clark Howard
...ZEBRA by Clark Howard Marek; 405 pages...
...today, the accounts of street crime have grown so familiar that death has lost its sting. In a book that should prove this year's Helter Skelter, Crime Writer Clark Howard restores to this now routine event a primal horror. His pounding narrative meticulously describes the so-called Zebra killings of 1973-74, when 23 white San Franciscans were murdered or maimed by a group of Black Muslim extremists. In the retelling, the cold jargon of police files leaps starkly to life...
...police department. In exasperation, an enterprising homicide detective, Gus Coreris, violates departmental rules by producing sketches of the killers from his own imagination. One of them resembles a real killer, who is thrown into such a panic that he considers informing on the others. Then the police launch Operation Zebra: stopping and searching black youths who bear any likeness to the sketches. Overreacting to a desperate effort to deal with a genuine menace, the American Civil Liberties Union and various black groups indignantly denounce the police action as racist. In response to a lawsuit, Operation Zebra is declared unconstitutional...
Howard is clearly unhappy with that possibility. For the true villain of his book is a criminal-justice system that fails to protect society from its marauders. There is, however, another villain in Zebra - one that Howard somewhat slights. In concentrating on the crimes, hideous as they are, he does not really grapple with the social ecology that may drive ill-educated, rootless men to acts of such brutality. Still, Howard's pronouncement echoes like a scream on a dark street: "California [has] a bad habit of letting its convicted killers out to kill again...