Dead Opposite
The Lives And Loss Of Two American Boys
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In the early morning of February 17, 1991, a nineteen-year-old Yale student on his way home from a party was shot through the heart on a New Haven street by a single bullet from a .22-caliber handgun. His wallet, with forty-six dollars inside, was left intact beside him. As murders go, it was senseless, motiveless, and as random as a blindly flung stone. The boy was white, privileged, and widely loved, a scholar and athlete, with a future that seemed assured. The boy accused in his killing, a sixteen-year-old gang member from the inner city, was an angry, desperate youth whose life careened almost daily--as ghetto lives often do--between the never-distant prospects of jail and death.
Dead Opposite is the story of these two boys--and of the boys and men, fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, and friends who peopled their lives. Geoffrey Douglas tells the story of hope and hopelessness, ignorance and rage; of waste and courage and loss. But above all, it is the story of the chasm that divides us one from the other: black from white; rich from poor; the suburbs of Chevy Chase, Maryland, from the squalor and despair of New Haven's meanest streets. You will see and hear both stories. And by the end, you not only will have touched the differences of race, wealth, education, and hope, but will have seen and heard also the commonness that links us all--the love of a parent, the dreams of a child--that joins us, one to the other, as the humans we finally, sometimes sadly, are.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Christian Prince, a 19-year-old Yale student from an affluent Maryland family, was fatally shot in New Haven, Conn., in 1991; 16-year-old ghetto resident James (Dunc) Fleming Jr. was accused of the crime. At trial, he was found guilty of conspiracy, but the jury reached no decision on the murder charge; in his second trial, Fleming was exonerated of murder. He is now serving a nine-year sentence. In his sociological exploration, Douglas (Class: The Wreckage of an American Family) explains that, as the offspring of a comfortable white family, he understands the Princes better than the Flemings, but his account is scrupulously fair to both families. His investigation of this tragedy led him to conclude that the Kerner Report's 1967 prediction has come to pass: there are indeed two societies in the U.S., which are, as Douglas puts it, ``not at war, not separate but totally estranged.'' He believes many African Americans, at least in urban areas, live in a world where conventional values have been turned upside down, with no expectation of reversal. A depressing report. Photos not seen by PW.
