دانلود کتاب Who Killed George Jackson?

On August 21, 1971, while running across the yard of San Quentin Prison with a gun in his hand, George Jackson was shot and killed. He was twenty-nine years old. By all reports he had been an extraordinary man⁠—black revolutionary leader, enormously gifted writer, almost certainly a murderer, a man widely admired and deeply hated. And as his life was filled with contradictions, so were⁠—and are⁠—the circumstances of his death obscured by controversy and rumor.

Who Killed George Jackson? is a brilliantly successful attempt to find out not only who George Jackson really was and how he died, but far more important, why. Jo Durden-Smith, a young English documentary-film producer and journalist, began his search for facts as a believer, a veteran of 1960’s radical politics to whom Jackson’s book Soledad Brother had come as a revelation. To him, Jackson’s death was an important, simple event, “a paradigm of what happens in America to those who know too much and talk too loud.” But as he pursued leads and made his way deeper and deeper into the case, it became apparent that whatever it was that happened that day at San Quentin, nothing about it was simple. His book carries the reader with him from discovery to discovery ... as he traces and tries to understand the mysterious actions of Stephen Bingham, the white lawyer who was accused of smuggling the gun to Jackson and who vanished immediately afterward, a fugitive ever since ... as he searches out the true identity of the woman who accompanied Bingham into San Quentin ... as he pinpoints crucial inconsistencies in the accounts of guards and other prison authorities ... as he listens to the bizarre yet irresistibly believable tales told by the police undercover informant (and double⁠—or perhaps triple⁠—agent) Louis Tackwood ... as he analyzes and tries to fit together the motives of the widely differing groups whose interests touched on⁠—and might possibly explain⁠—the shootout and its background: the penal administration, Jackson’s own revolutionary “army,” the Panthers, the secret local and state police agencies, the radical organizations hovering on the right and the left....

Five solid months of detective work in California, hundreds of interviews across the country, thousands of pages of documents, letters and other papers, most of them unpublished⁠—out of these emerges the fascinating, terrifying story told in this book. No one may ever be able to say with precision who killed George Jackson, but it is unlikely that anyone will come closer to answering the question than Jo Durden-Smith has. For what he found, surrounding and controlling the bloody events in the prison yard, was a kind of widespread public madness⁠—delusion feeding on delusion⁠—a pervasive and peculiarly self-destructive contagion of fantasy from which virtually no one involved, on either side of the law, was immune. His investigation uncovered the realities that make us see Jackson’s life and death in a new light⁠—realities that will force us to see our immediate past, and ourselves, in a new light too.