D B Cooper says:

This is a very good and well researched book but I’m surprised it won the National Book Award due to the flaws it does have. This is from the new school of writing which makes the reader wish there was a limit on the time an author may spend researching his book. The result is more a list of facts with words to join them together than a story. Ossian Sweet probably passed a man named Robert in the hall, who research shows was the janitor – who cares? (this is not an actual quote from the book). Worse yet is the lack of objectivity. America’s record of race relations is in fact so horrible that attempts to exaggerate it are unproductive. When whites kill a black man in this book they slaughter viciously without provocation, but when blacks kill policemen in random acts they are frightened and make a mistake. This puts Mr. Boyle in pretty good company, Harriet Beecher Stowe was criticized (by her fans) for the same subjective advocacy. But in this she handed her critics a platform from which to dismiss her work, which was a pity, and Mr. Boyle should have honored the true struggles and suffering of his story’s African-American characters by avoiding the same trap. Again, the facts are shocking and tell the story, no ’spin’ is necessary. Beyond these substantive flaws are inexcusably basic editing problems. Winning the National Book Award should take more than spell-check. Pouring and poring are both words, but they’re not the same word, nor are peak and peek interchangeable. I don’t mean to be overly negative, this is an important book about a period in general and events in particular which deserve to be written about well, and Mr. Boyle does so. But if this is truly the best non-fiction book of last year let’s call it a lean year and look forward to 2005.
Rating: 3 / 5

Maxtone Witherball says:

Arc of Justice is not a well-written book. It is, however, full of important and interesting information: About the suffering of blacks in Florida after Reconstruction; about life at black colleges and professional schools in the early 1900s; about Detroit’s black ghetto post-World War I, and the all-white neighborhoods hemming it in; about Dr. Ossian Sweet and his brothers, who knew all of the preceding firsthand; about the rise of the NAACP; about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Detroit; about Clarence Darrow, Arthur Garfield Hays, Walter White, James Weldon Johnson, and other progressive luminaries; about Darrow and Hays’ defense of the Sweets and others in a murder trial.

But again, and alas, this information is not well-conveyed. At a macro level, the book lacks organization and cohesion. Not only does it jump around in time–back and forth from 1925–it abruptly changes focus about halfway through, even though it’s not split into two parts, just ten rather long chapters. And on the heels of the change of focus comes a loss of focus. The author begins to indulge in lengthy, distracting biographical asides, and magnifies tangential stories to such a degree that they overwhelm what should rightfully be–judging from the first 200 pages or so–the “saga” of Dr. Sweet. In fact, midway through, Dr. Sweet is demoted to minor status, and all but a couple of his co-defendants are literally never mentioned again. (You may note the irony in this marginalization.)

At a more micro level, the author makes a mistake in abandoning his native academic tongue and attempting a more fictive style, which he all but admits in his acknowledgments is entirely foreign to him. More specifically, the author’s chief sin in this regard is this that he purports to be omniscient, writing as if he knows characters’ unspoken thoughts and motivations (with the rare hedge that someone “must have” felt some way). This conceit might have been forgivable if the author’s interpretations were convincing. But too often, I could readily imagine a character experiencing a different–if not the exact opposite–emotion from the one the author ascribes to him or her.

In addition, the author is given to very long and convoluted or disjointed sentences and paragraphs, which all too frequently require a second or even third read. The author is also far too fond of the words “slashing,” “searing,” and “crisp,” which even if used sparingly mark a writer as an amateur.

Yet another failing at the sentence level are the hundreds of typos which pock the book throughout. Practically every single page contains a misspelled word or missing punctuation mark or missing word or the like. Not to mention the needlessly small type and cramped pages of the paperback.

This isn’t all to say that Arc of Justice isn’t worth reading. It is, again, full of information worth knowing. (Although, to be fair, it does leave many questions unanswered. For instance, what was Dr. Sweet’s relationship with his parents like after he left his childhood home at age 13? And it answers a great deal of unasked questions. For example, I did not need to be told once, let alone repeatedly, that Darrow was a womanizer.) And at its best, Arc of Justice does successfully recreate some truly terrifying scenes of persecution. And most important, I’m not aware of any other books that cover the same territory.

Just be prepared to put up with some shoddy prose, if you do decide to give the book a shot.
Rating: 2 / 5

E. Lewis says:

Wonderfully written, this story is gripping until the very end, though it is entirely nonfiction. You will not believe the kinds of things these poor people had to go through.
Rating: 5 / 5