Eye of the Hurricane (Carter) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
An uplifting tale of how a man can transcend shackles of all sorts.
Globe and Mail


Long story short, if Eye of the Hurricane doesn’t inspire you, nothing will.
Smooth Magazine


Carter was a top middleweight boxing contender of the early 1960s (who had already served time in prison) until he was arrested for a triple murder in 1966 and convicted—not once but twice. He was incarcerated until his conviction was finally overturned on appeal in 1985. Bob Dylan had protested his imprisonment in song; later Denzel Washington portrayed him on the screen. While in prison, Carter authored his first book, The Sixteenth Round. Perhaps the greatest proof of his innocence is his career after he was released from prison. As he relates here, he spent 13 years as chair and CEO of the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted, and since splitting with that organization in 2005 has been CEO of Innocence International, another group working to free innocent prisoners. While he harks back to his own legal tribulations, the core of his new book is his condemnation of the flaws in our criminal justice system: the book's protagonists are the wrongly convicted prisoners whose stories he imparts. The legal verdicts on Carter were impaired, but the verdict on this book is positive. It is not a sports book for the casual boxing fan, but it's essential for the socially conscious. —Jim Burns, Jacksonville P.L., FL
Library Journal


Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a former middleweight prizefighter whose 1967 imprisonment for a triple homicide at a...New Jersey bar became a cause celebre in the 1970s...was released from prison in 1985 by a federal judge who cited a conviction predicated on “an appeal to racism rather than reason.”.... For more information about Carter, check out Sam Chaiton and Terry Swinton’s Lazarus and the Hurricane (1991) and James Hirsch’s Hurricane.
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