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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]

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"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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In the case of the Polecs, this decency comes at a price. Freedman and Knoedelseder's portrait of the family as good Catholics who raised their children to respect the principles of hard work and honesty doesn't feel forced. You can see the truth of it in John Polec's response to his son's death. Analyzing the city's 911 system, Polec, a computer programmer, discovered a system set up so badly that it took, on an average weekend night, perhaps an hour for an incoming call to be relayed to a police cruiser. Digging for possible solutions, Polec helped discover that, although the city planned to upgrade to a $50 million system when it could muster the funds, it could get the same capabilities with a cell phone system, for only $3.25 million.

The authors admire the Polecs because they decide to press for an overhaul of the 911 system rather than suing the city. "We're not suing anybody," John Polec said. "We will not profit from this tragedy. I don't want Eddie's name and 'lawsuit' mentioned in the same sentence." We're meant to hear these as the words of a man with too much integrity to participate in our litigious society. In the end, the family had to threaten to exercise its option to sue in order to get the city to agree to fix the system.

The threat worked, but in exchange the city, still dragging its feet, insisted that the Polecs sign an agreement stating that they would "not file a lawsuit against the City or its officials and employees for any claim arising from the death of Eddie Polec." Had the Polecs decided to sue in the first place, they would have been in a much stronger position. Under enormous public criticism, Philadelphia would likely have settled the case, and the Polecs would have had the money that they planned to donate to the city to install a new emergency system. The family wound up signing away its legal right to sue before Philadelphia would agree to protect its citizens.

That's appalling, but it's hardly surprising. For most institutions there is no greater measure of power than money and no greater threat to power than the loss of money. To change, they must be forced to pay a price that they will understand as a diminishment of their power. (I once worked in the advertising agency of one of the country's largest investment firms. The firm had been fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for violating the prohibition against using promissory language in advertising. But the billion-dollar company regarded the fine -- I believe it was around $25,000 -- as a drop in the bucket, an expense of doing business. The punishment was simply not adequate to put a stop to the offense.) That's why the commonly held idea that lawsuits are merely an attempt to profit from tragedy is absurd. Institutions, whether governments or corporations, know how to mollify and dissipate public outrage, and thus to continue business as usual. Lawsuits are often the only way citizens can put themselves on an equal footing.

Families who have suffered a violent loss may feel unaccountably dirty for engaging in litigation. Both the Polecs and the Gibsons (who brought a lawsuit against Simon's Rock College) understand that a courtroom is no place to look for emotional closure. They know that there's a very real possibility that a lawsuit may exacerbate their bitterness. You can't help but sympathize with their desire to get on with their lives, to purge thoughts of recrimination from their memories of their sons. I'd argue, though, that in cases like theirs, lawsuits are a moral responsibility to the dead.

The question of responsibility weighs heavily on Gregory Gibson throughout his memoir, "Goneboy." Discovering the failure of Simon's Rock College to take even the most basic safety precautions with Wayne Lo, the Gibsons didn't hesitate to sue the college. But Gibson realizes that the lawsuit won't answer the questions he has about his son's death. Setting out to talk to as many people involved in the case as possible, Gibson encounters the collector who traded in the gun Lo used to kill his son, the gun dealer who sold Lo that gun, the college officials whose failure to take action seems so inexplicable, the students and employees who tried to do something to stop Lo, friends of his dead son and of his son's killer and eventually the parents of Lo himself.

Next page | Confronting the man whose incompetence killed Galen