
I Can't Breathe
A Killing on Bay Street
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Narrated by:
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Dominic Hoffman
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By:
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Matt Taibbi
A work of riveting literary journalism that explores the roots and repercussions of the infamous killing of Eric Garner by the New York City police—from the bestselling author of The Divide
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST
On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk after a police officer put him in what has been described as an illegal chokehold during an arrest for selling bootleg cigarettes. The final moments of Garner’s life were captured on video and seen by millions. His agonized last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter protest movement. A grand jury ultimately declined to indict the officer who wrestled Garner to the pavement.
Matt Taibbi’s deeply reported retelling of these events liberates Eric Garner from the abstractions of newspaper accounts and lets us see the man in full—with all his flaws and contradictions intact. A husband and father with a complicated personal history, Garner was neither villain nor victim, but a fiercely proud individual determined to do the best he could for his family, bedeviled by bad luck, and ultimately subdued by forces beyond his control.
In America, no miscarriage of justice exists in isolation, of course, and in I Can’t Breathe, Taibbi also examines the conditions that made this tragedy possible. Featuring vivid vignettes of life on the street and inside our Kafkaesque court system, Taibbi’s kaleidoscopic account illuminates issues around policing, mass incarceration, the underground economy, and racial disparity in law enforcement. No one emerges unsullied, from the conservative district attorney who half-heartedly prosecutes the case to the progressive mayor caught between the demands of outraged activists and the foot-dragging of recalcitrant police officials.
A masterly narrative of urban America and a scathing indictment of the perverse incentives built into our penal system, I Can’t Breathe drills down into the particulars of one case to confront us with the human cost of our broken approach to dispensing criminal justice.
©2017 Matt Taibbi (P)2017 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
"Narrator Dominic Hoffman's gravelly timbre and tough tone are an ideal fit for this outstanding piece of journalism. There is a lot of dialogue here - a testament to Taibbi's outstanding reporting - and Hoffman expertly characterizes New York and African-American speech without slipping into caricature. He also manages to capture Taibbi's dark and occasionally sarcastic humor when recounting the injustice of the Garner case and others like it." (AudioFile)
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I would ask every school assign this to students so they understand the society they live in, that our laws do not apply equally, our rights still subject to violation based on race, that the segregation and inequity of the past has very much reemerged with devastating consequences.
Matt Taibbi makes clear the prolonged ignorance, wilful or not, of white America to the extreme injustice, structural racism, and systemic oppression faced by intentionally segregated communities and exposes the history of official misconduct, policing quotas, broken windows, and other misguided policies that led to the criminalization of communities of color. Well researched, fast paced and unsparing in its assessment of NYC's political class, it honors the life of Eric Garner and his daughter's struggle for justice. In light of her untimely death, this book has even more resonance, as it tells the true nature of the system she was still fighting against through her last years of life. Rest in peace Erica.
Powerfully written, story of injustice, MUST READ!
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A must read that explores our racist society
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A Must Read
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Explores the cause and effect of the event
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Eric Garner the man brought to life
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Heartbreaking
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An unforgettable accounting of Eric Gardner’s murder
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Urgently Important Journalism
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This book changed my life.
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