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October 28, 2004
BOOK REVIEWS: Bill Kurtis on the Death Penalty; Ms. Moffett Becomes a Teacher
Reviewed by David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
Hinton (HNN) -- I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: PublicAffairs is a publisher of thought-provoking, important nonfiction books and is a national treasure.
Two new books that add to the New York City publisher’s luster are The Death Penalty on Trial: Crisis in American Justice (PublicAffairs, 219 pages, $25.00) by Bill Kurtis and Ms. Moffett’s First Year: Becoming a Teacher in America (PublicAffairs, 272 pages, $25.00) by Abby Goodnough.
Kurtis and Goodnough deal respectively with two crises in America : Our criminal justice system and our public education system, especially in big cities.
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Concentrating on two men who were wrongly convicted of murder and spent years on death row, Kurtis brings his law school training—he was admitted to the bar in his native Kansas in 1966—and his journalism experience at CBS and on his own “American Justice”, “Cold Case Files” and “Investigative Reports” shows to bear on the death penalty.
We in West Virginia should be grateful that the death penalty was abolished in 1965; the monetary cost to communities of prosecuting a death penalty case is staggering, as Kurtis points out at the end of his book where he sums up his case. Kurtis cites a 10-year-old North Carolina study showing the cost of a single death penalty case was $2.16 million more than a life sentence—and that included lifetime incarceration costs.
The two defendants examined by Kurtis are both white, as were the victims of the murders they were accused of and convicted for. Kurtis says he didn’t want to add the complications of race to an already broken situation.
Ray Krone was tried and convicted of the 1991 murder of Kim Ancona in Phoenix, Ariz. Thomas Kimbell was tried for the 1994 murder of a woman and three girls near New Castle, Pa., northwest of Pittsburgh. Bonnie Dryfuse, her daughters Jacqueline and Heather and her husband Thomas’s niece Stephanie Herko were stabbed to death in a bloody frenzy in the family’s mobile home.
Writing in the purposeful but intriguing style readers will recognize from his TV shows, Kurtis shows how the power of the prosecutor, who has the resources of state, county and local law enforcement on his side, along with the power of such holdovers of the past as grand juries, can end up swaying juries, despite the flimsiness of the evidence. As a reporter who has covered murder cases, I recognize what took place in the trials of Krone and Kimbell.
Bookending the quite detailed descriptions of the two trials and the appeals that led to the freeing from death row of Krone and Kimbell is the January 2003 move by outgoing Illinois Gov. George Ryan to pardon four death row inmates and the startling aftermath of this brave and controversial move. A caution to sensitive readers: Kurtis is graphic in his descriptions of the victims. Kurtis’s book is a powerful indictment of the death penalty by a man who once supported it. He calls into question abuses of power inherent in our adversarial system of criminal justice and points out that we are the only major industrialized nation in the world—except for China —that still has the death penalty. This is must reading at its most compelling.
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Why would a successful New York City legal secretary at the peak of her career quit her job and take a pay cut to become a teacher in one of the city’s toughest elementary schools?
New York Times reporter Abby Goodnough, now the paper’s Miami bureau chief, was an education reporter in the summer of 2000 when she decided to concentrate on the decision of Donna Moffett, 45, to enroll in a program to college graduates who didn’t take education courses into public school teachers. The New York City Teaching Fellows program is still operating.
Goodnough followed Moffett through her seven-week course and into a first-grade classroom at P.S. 92 in Flatbush, Brooklyn . She kept in close touch with Moffett and her new colleagues throughout the first year, writing an award-winning series for The Times.
“Ms. Moffett’s First Year” is based on the series and is as important to today’s readers as Kurtis’s examination of the death penalty. By now most of us have been bombarded with articles and books detailing the widening gap in education between the privileged, largely white and Asian-American children and the underprivileged, usually African-American and Hispanic children, in the suburbs and inner cities, respectively. In many cities white and black teachers make extraordinary financial sacrifices to send their children to private schools if they can’t afford to live in suburbs with highly rated schools.
Goodnough’s account of Donna Moffett tackling her new career as she could only imagine it from her job at a prestigious Manhattan law firm is by turns funny and scary. Her supervisors—many of them tough black women who came up the education ladder the hard way—rarely cut her slack. The seven-week course was just a prologue to the year-long boot camp. Goodnough’s book is enriched by the way she recounts the give and take between the newly minted teacher and her pupils. This hard-bitten veteran newsman admits he was misty-eyed several times during the reading of Goodnough’s book!
n epilogue details the impact of the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Act on Moffett and her pupils. The recently much-maligned Gray Lady of West 43 rd Street is fortunate to have a reporter of Goodnough’s talent on its staff. Like “The Death Penalty on Trial,” “Ms. Moffett’s First Year” is a book that addresses a critical situation in present-day America.
More Book Reviews by David M. Kinchen
— 11/15/04 BOOK REVIEW: Roth Envisions a Frightening 'What If?' in 'The Plot Against America'
— 11/24/04 BOOK REVIEWS: Bush, Blair and Iraq; A Shrink at Nuremberg; Updike's Sexy Geek; Potomac Fever Smites an Academic
— 12/15/04 BOOK REVIEWS: 'Past Imperfect' Covers Complexities of History, Plagiarism Issues; 'His Excellency' Reveals George Washington's Accomplishments
— 12/29/04 BOOK REVIEWS: ‘de Kooning’ Chronicles Rise of American Art Supremacy; ‘Adams vs. Jefferson’ Shows That Controversial Presidential Elections are Nothing New
— 01/17/05 BOOK REVIEW: Max Hastings on Germany's 'Armageddon' as Allies from West,
East Conquer Third Reich
— 01/24/05 BOOK REVIEW: ‘Images of America: Huntington’ Displays Glorious Architecture of West Virginia’s First Planned City
— 01/27/05 BOOK REVIEW: ‘Auschwitz’ Personalizes Horror That Should Never Be Forgotten
David M. Kinchen is the Editor of HuntingtonNews.Net, repsponses and article submissions can be made to .
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