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Rockets' red glare
The author of "Dog Soldiers" picks five great contemporary war novels.
By Robert Stone
[10/11/99]

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"The Remains of River Names" by Matt Briggs
A beautifully sensitive novel looks at hippie-generation parents and the kids they weren't prepared to raise.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[10/11/99]

Ivory Tower
Crashing the top
Women at elite universities may have broken the ivory ceiling, but they're still battling old-fashioned discrimination.
By Ann Douglas
[10/11/99]

Thin gruel for Vonnegut fans
The film "Breakfast of Champions" misses the point: What "Bokononists" love is Father Kurt's smart anti-intellectualism.
By Alissa Lara Quart
[10/08/99]

Reviews
"Assuming the Position" by Rick Whitaker
A onetime hustler takes a long, hard look at the Life.
By Dennis Drabelle
[10/08/99]

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How do you keep any semblance of grace or dignity when dealing with the death of a child? A parent who suffers that loss -- whether by violence or accident or sickness -- experiences a violation of the natural order. Who expects to outlive a son or a daughter? And how do you keep bitterness and anger from poisoning your life when -- as in the cases of Eddie Polec and Galen Gibson, recounted in the new books "In Eddie's Name" and "Goneboy" -- the death could have been prevented?

Eddie Polec -- who, like Galen Gibson, was in his late teens -- was beaten to death with a baseball bat by a gang of kids in a church parking lot in his Philadelphia suburb. Galen Gibson was shot by a deranged classmate at the small college he attended in Massachusetts. Wayne Lo, the kid who killed Galen Gibson, and the gang of kids who murdered Eddie Polec must bear the ultimate responsibility for those deaths. But they couldn't have committed their crimes were it not for the stupidity and cowardice of others.

In Eddie's Name: One Family's Triumph over Tragedy By Bryn Freedman and William Knoedelseder Faber and Faber, 256 pages Nonfiction Buy In Eddie's Name: One Family's Triumph over Tragedy by Bryn Freedman and William Knoedelseder Goneboy: A Walkabout By Gregory Gibson Kodansha Books, 273 pages Nonfiction Buy Goneboy: A Walkabout by Gregory Gibson

In the aftermath of the Polec murder, tapes of calls to Philadelphia 911 revealed that a series of callers had been warning authorities about a gang of baseball bat-wielding kids for nearly 45 minutes before Polec was attacked. Some of the 911 operators weren't familiar enough with suburban Philadelphia to recognize where the trouble was, and others simply hung up on the callers who were trying to convey the urgency of the situation. "Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute," shouted one operator to a caller who was checking to make sure he'd been heard correctly. "I have the information. You can hang up now," cutting the conversation, and Eddie Polec's chances of survival, dead.

The incompetence surrounding Galen Gibson's death is even more extreme. On the morning of the day that Wayne Lo went on the spree that left two dead and four wounded at Simon's Rock College in Great Barrington, Mass., a package had arrived at the college for him from a company called Classic Arms. The dean of the college, Bernie Rodgers, disregarded this and several other obvious signs that Lo was keeping a weapon on campus in violation of the law. When, more than three hours before the shooting, a friend of Lo's became convinced that he was about to use the gun, he called campus security (getting an answering machine) and then a residence advisor at Lo's dorm. The advisor called Rodgers and then the college provost, Ba Win. For at least 45 minutes before the shootings, Rodgers and Win knew that Lo had a gun and was in his dorm, yet neither man called the police or made any effort to quietly alert the other students. Instead, they waited for another residence director to arrive so they could question Lo together, and during that time Lo began shooting, killing two and wounding four before surrendering to the police.

It comes as no surprise that the Polec and Gibson families learned this information primarily from the media. The story told in both "In Eddie's Name" (written by journalists Bryn Freedman and William Knoedelseder, a husband-and-wife team who covered the Polec story as it unfolded) and in "Goneboy" (written by Galen's father, Gregory Gibson) is in part about people under brutal emotional circumstances who are disabused of the faith they've put in institutions like the city of Philadelphia and Simon's Rock College. It speaks well of the essential decency of both families that they did not succumb to cynicism as a result. But these books tell another story as well, though it's an unwitting one. They show that decency is no match for institutions that are determined to cover their collective asses and that sometimes being ruthless is the right thing to do.

Next page | "I don't want Eddie's name and 'lawsuit' in the same sentence"