The Savage City

Dennis Boutsikaris moves flawlessly through three different narrative lines in this audiobook without confusing the listener or mixing up points of view or speaking patterns. The author weaves the real-life stories of a corrupt cop, a wrongly accused African-American, and a gang leader turned Black Panther activist who live in New York City in the 1960s. His goal is to examine the challenges, problems, and pitfalls that sent the city into decline by the mid-1970s. Boutsikaris shifts smoothly from the impersonal history of the city to the more dynamic and engaging accounts of the individuals. The author's crisp prose and Boutsikaris's strong delivery will keep listeners engaged throughout this street-level account of the social forces at work in that time and place. L.E. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

November 29, 2010
Forget Vietnam—New York City in the 1960s and 1970s hosted its own civil war between a racist police force and a newly militant black underclass, according to this bare-knuckled true-crime saga. A journalist and ex-screenwriter for NYPD Blue and Homicide, English (Havana Nocturne) distills a decade of conflict into three iconic figures: George Whitmore, a black teen wrongly charged with the grisly "Career Girl Murders" on the basis of a coerced confession; Bill Phillips, a dirty cop whose testimony exposed ubiquitous police corruption; and Dhoruba Bin Wahad, a Black Panther targeted by both law enforcement and rival comrades. English paints a vivid, gritty panorama of a city wracked by racial insurgency, showing us precinct house backrooms where black suspects are beaten and white perps let off with a bribe; seething ghettos ready to riot at the next police shooting; and mean streets where the cops themselves face machine-gun fire. The author's pulpy prose—"The Career Girls Murder story was like a good-looking whore"—and episodic subplots don't quite support his vision of urban apocalypse. Still, English gives us a gripping, noirish retrospective of an era when brutal misrule sparked desperate rage. Photos.

October 15, 2010

The city was New York and the time 1963, when two young white women were murdered in their apartment and nearly blind black teenager George Whitmore Jr. was charged. The corrupt and deeply racist NYPD had evidently coerced a confession. Best-selling author English weaves together the story of Whitmore, bad cop Bill Phillips, and Dhoruba bin Wahad, a member of the fledgling Black Panther Party, to tell this chilling story. History as wake-up call; with a 100,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 15, 2011

Superior chronicle of the most violent decade in New York City history.

Through a crisp journalistic lens, English (Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution, 2008, etc.) retraces the tormented life of three men who proved pivotal in Manhattan's "now-legendary descent into mayhem" from the early '60s to the mid '70s, as the struggling civil-rights movement battled a corrupt, brutal law-enforcement agency. Following the March on Washington in the late summer of 1963, two white Upper East Side women were found bound together, raped and brutally slashed to death. Police scrambled to bring the increasingly sensational double-homicide case to swift closure. George Whitmore, a naïve, 19-year-old, partially blind black laborer, was falsely identified as the perpetrator and coerced into signing a multiple-felony confession by the NYPD, then a primarily white-male "autonomous institution." Whitmore spent a decade defending himself in the face of a merciless, unyielding justice system. English also provides a deep profile of Bill Phillips, a thieving, prejudiced, corrupt second-generation police officer, as well as of Dhoruba Bin Wahad, a fearless ex-convict and Black Panther Party. Culled from a host of wide-ranging interviews, memoirs, court-case transcripts, books, and documentary programming, the author effectively addresses key events like the 1963 Harlem Riots, the shockwaves of Malcolm X's assassination and the Knapp Commission's dogged scrutiny of NYPD corruption. Noting that the three centerpiece profiles he features (and the era in which they lived) are "largely forgotten today," their separate legacies should serve as a cautionary reminder.

A comprehensive, still-shocking exhumation of racial discord in America.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from December 1, 2010
In Manhattan in August 1963, two white women were hacked to death in a crime the tabloids would call the Career Girls Murders. The police picked up a near-blind 19-year-old black youth and spent hours pressuring him into confessing to the crime. George Whitmore would spend the next decade fighting the setup as police and prosecutors persisted in what they knew to be a miscarriage of justice. That same decade was the most violent in the history of New York City, with escalating racial tension between the police and black nationalist groups. Acclaimed journalist English profiles Whitmore, as well as Bill Phillips, a brazenly corrupt second-generation NYPD cop, and Dhoruba bin Wahad, a gangbanger turned Black Panther, to present an epic look at the racial animus, fear, and hatred that characterized that troubled decade. Drawing on interviews with former police and prosecutors, activists, hustlers, and journalists, English recounts a time of growing and visceral hostility between a police department steeped in corruption and a besieged black community that exploded in violence. He chronicles the rise of the Black Panther Party in New York and the Knapp Commission investigation of police corruption that was later depicted in the movies Serpico and Prince of the City. Through the lives of three ostensibly unrelated men, English peels back the underlying turmoil that led to the violent period and the unaddressed social ills that remain to this day. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The New York Times best-selling author of Havana Nocturne returns with a dramatic true story of race, police corruption, and urban chaos in 1960s New York.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)