Breaking Blue
Author: Timothy Egan
In Breaking Blue, Timothy Egan reports a true story of crime, corruption, and cover-up that reads like a thriller and offers a compelling look at the rough-and-tumble days of the Inland Northwest during the Depression. In Egan's vivid account, follow modern-day lawman Tony Bamonte -- graduate student, logger's son, and Vietnam veteran -- as his investigation plunges him back in time to black-market crime, extortion, and even murder. As he unfolds layer after layer of unsavory detail, Bamonte's determination leads him to the murder weapon -- missing half a century -- and to the ex-cop he's convinced is the murderer.
Publishers Weekly
In 1935, Spokane, Wash., was in the sixth year of the Great Depression. Unemployment was high. Civilian Conservation Corps workers were arriving in droves from the East for the Grand Coulee Dam project. Crime was rampant, and a series of creamery robberies had the town on edge. Then, on Sept. 4, the Pend Oreille County town marshal investigating these crimes was murdered. The mystery of George Conniff's death went unsolved until 1989, when Tony Bamonte, sheriff of Pend Oreille County and a graduate student, inadvertently uncovered information that generations of police had conspired to keep hidden. Egan ( The Good Rain ), Seattle bureau chief for the New York Times, lumbers occasionally, but his account of the reopened investigation generally resonates with regional color. Bamonte's investigation of the killing started as scholarly research, but stepped up when ``a convergence of conscience and coincidence'' suggested that the marshal had been shot by a cop protecting colleagues associated with the robberies. In a deathbed confession, a cop revealed that the Spokane police were involved in more than ``a conspiracy of small corruptions.'' Egan evocatively resurrects the scenes and raw insensitivities of '30s police life in the region, from Mother's Place, the diner where cops plotted their heists, to the Hotel de Gink, where transients stayed. (May)
Library Journal
In the course of preparing a master's thesis on law enforcement in Pend Oreille County, Washington, Sheriff Tony Bamonte discovered new evidence relating to the 1935 murder of Town Marshal George Conniff. Bamonte uncovered documents that implicated another police officer in the murder and also revealed a widespread cover-up by the Spokane Police Department. Already unpopular because of his confrontations with the lumber industry and his criticism of other law-enforcement agencies, Bamonte further angered the police community by disregarding the code that forbids going after a fellow police officer--``breaking blue.'' Tracking down witnesses who verified his suspicions, Bamonte turned his efforts to a search for the murder weapon, a gun thrown into a river more than 50 years earlier. The trail eventually led him to a final surprising discovery, which in turn was capped by an even greater irony. Egan, Seattle bureau chief of the New York Times , tells this remarkable story with a journalist's thoroughness and a novelist's ability to evoke place and character. The tale is rich in history and suspense and is recommended for all crime collections.--Ben Harrison, East Orange P.L., N.J.
Kirkus Reviews
Powerhouse story of an iconoclastic sheriff who cracked through 54 years of police coverups and solved the oldest open murder case in the country. Beginning with a brilliant evocation of 1935 Spokane and Pend Oreille County, Egan (Seattle bureau chief of The New York Times; The Good Rain, 1990) sets the scene for the killing of Spokane town marshal George Conniff, who had surprised men stealing butter from the local creamery. In the fifth year of the Depression, Spokane was full of reluctant hobos—many of them farmers who had fled the dust bowls of the Midwest—living, hungry for food and work, in a Hooverville by the local rail yards. The Spokane police regularly extorted sex, food, and money from these "vagrants" and collected also from the bootleggers, saloons, whorehouses, Chinese lotteries, and opium dens in the "Queen City of the Richest Empire in the Western Hemisphere." When a shortage doubled the price of butter, 6'3" rock-fisted Detective Clyde Ralstin and his partner profitably robbed dairies until the night that Conniff was killed. Ralstin was fingered for the killing by fellow detective Charles Sonnabend, but Sonnabend was ordered by the brass to stop investigating, and Ralstin disappeared. Fifty-four years later, in 1989, 47-year-old Sheriff Anthony Bamonte—former logger, Vietnam vet, Spokane cop—was writing his master's thesis on the ten previous sheriffs of Pend Oreille County and discovered a 1955 deathbed statement by Sonnabend about the coverup. Bamonte began to probe the case and, amazingly, men and women in their 80s and 90s who had known Ralstin came forward. Egan's narration of Bamonte's methodical stalking, of the ring of paranoia tighteningaround Ralstin (living in a tiny Montana town and knowing of the hunt), and of murder refusing to stay buried after 54 years—all make for compulsive, white-knuckle reading. Egan rises into the Most Wanted group of true-crime writers with this smoothly told, exciting account.
Book about: Cuba Cocina or Flavors of India
States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control
Author: Jeffrey Herbst
Theories of international relations, assumed to be universally applicable, have failed to explain the creation of states in Africa. There, the interaction of power and space is dramatically different from what occurred in Europe. In his groundbreaking book, Jeffrey Herbst places the African state-building process in a truly comparative perspective, examining the problem of state consolidation from the precolonial period, through the short but intense interlude of European colonialism, to the modern era of independent states. Herbst's bold contention--that the conditions now facing African state-builders existed long before European penetration of the continent--is sure to provoke controversy, for it runs counter to the prevailing assumption that colonialism changed everything.
In identifying how the African state-building process differs from the European experience, Herbst addresses the fundamental problem confronting African leaders: how to extend authority over sparsely settled lands. Indeed, efforts to exert control over vast, inhospitable territories of low population density and varied environmental and geographical zones have resulted in devastating wars, millions of refugees, and dysfunctional governments perpetrating destructive policies.
Detailing the precise political calculations of distinct African leaders, Herbst isolates the basic dynamics of African state development. In analyzing how these leaders have attempted to consolidate power, he is able to evaluate a variety of policy alternatives for dealing with the fundamental political challenges facing African states today.
What People Are Saying
Charles Tilly
Herbst's arguments will excite controversy among students of African history and politics, who have built up an extensive story about European transformations of African politics. His analysis raises doubts about how deeply those transformations went; rather, he maintains that durable conditions of topography and social structure have long constrained African state formation. Herbst offers an integrated account of state formation, transformation, and deformation in sub-Saharan Africa.
Table of Contents:
Introduction 3
PART ONE: THE CHALLENGE OF STATE-BUILDING IN AFRICA 9
One The Challenge of State-Building in Africa 11
PART TWO: THE CONSTRUCTION OF STATES IN AFRICA 33
Two Power and Space in Precolonial Africa 35
Three The Europeans and the African Problem 58
Four The Political Kingdom in Independent Africa 97
PART THREE: NATIONAL DESIGN AND DOMESTIC POLITICS 137
Five National Design and the Broadcasting of Power 139
Six Chiefs, States, and the Land 173
PART FOUR: BOUNDARIES AND POWER 199
Seven The Coin of the African Realm 201
Eight The Politics of Migration and Citizenship 227
PART FIVE: CONCLUSION 249
Nine The Past and the Future of State Power in Africa 251
Index 273
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