Publisher's Weekly Review
This look at America's executioners and their victims is a combination of cinema v?rit? (think of Errol Morris's disturbing, and similarly disappointing, documentary, Mr. Death) and morbid fascination: "I wanted to know who carried out executions," and more specifically why they do it. Thus immersed in this "peculiar institution" for the last six years, Solotaroff (No Success Like Failure) brings readers on a discomfiting tour of the Death Belt, the statistical concentration of death-penalty states from Texas to Florida. Depicting ironically pleasant last meals with retarded convicts, the creepy antics of the death-house guards, and threats of possible innocents sent to their doom, Solotaroff specifically seeks not to illuminate the ongoing moral dialogue, but rather to examine the living complexities of executioners and the condemned, a relationship he oddly reveres as a kind of marriage although the metaphor is eventually abandoned in light of a cruel and imperfect bureaucracy. Readers visit death rows, hang out with executioners and meet the condemned, but the people along the way are alienated and alienating, and readers must remind themselves they are human beings. More problematic is that Solotaroff dodges the moral quagmire (claiming he embarked on this project out of "curiosity"), leaving the ethical responsibilities of his writing in a decidedly gray place. This is a well-written and readable book but an inadequate consideration of an important and timely subject. (Sept.) Forecast: Interest in the death penalty has increased in the wake of Timothy McVeigh's execution, and will be in the spotlight when Legal Lynching by Jesse Jackson Sr. and Jesse Jackson Jr. comes out in October, so sales of this might be buoyed by that book's wake. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Socially conscious readers will appreciate Solotaroff's presentation on a subgroup involved in the death-penalty debate--the executioners. Solotaroff identifies the southernmost tier of states as a "Death Belt" in the U.S., in which a "disproportionate number of executions [are] carried out." He homes in on executioners' workday milieus and reports cultural tidbits such as one of Charlie Manson's memories of dear old mom. Manson said his imprisoned mother witnessed a hanging when he was four. She was "hiding near the gallows, trying to avoid her work detail, when the hanged man's head was ripped off by the fall from the gallows and rolled past her." Charlie being Charlie, the story's veracity has been questioned, but "`that would be the Hyer case,'" says Watt Espy, "America's foremost historian of executions," who explains that, given the state of security at the prison in question, Mother Manson might well have witnessed the unintended decapitation. Entertainingly written, well researched and documented, this is important reading for death-penalty activists, pro and con, and other concerned citizens. --Mike Tribby
Library Journal Review
Taking a more blood-and-guts approach, journalist Solotaroff goes behind the scenes and interviews the executioners who carry out the sentences. He concentrates on Parchman State Penitentiary in Mississippi and on two men, Donald Cabana, who quit his job as warden because he could not stomach the death penalty, and Donald Hocutt, who appears to relish his work yet suffers from a list of physical and psychological ailments. Solotaroff goes back to Parchman's early days as a plantation, to the early history of capital punishment in America, then on to the electric chair, the gas chamber, and lethal injection. His story is not for the fainthearted. Solotaroff does not argue directly against the death penalty but simply shows what it entails in its most bareknuckled form. The executioners' bravado and the mutilated bodies of the executed go hand in hand. While Legal Lynching should appeal to a wider audience, The Last Face You'll Ever See belongs in all crime collections, where it should stand out for its originality. Frances Sandiford, Green Haven Correctional Facility Lib., Stormville, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
