'I Can’t Breathe' is clear-eyed, hard-hitting account of Eric Garner's death

Thanks to a cellphone video shot by a bystander, the immediate facts of the case are clear. And they are sickening. On a New York City sidewalk in July of 2014, an unarmed man who resists arrest not through any kind of physically aggressive behavior, but simply by remaining rooted to the spot, is partly subdued by several policemen, one of whom uses a chokehold – which is illegal. The policemen wrestle the man to the ground, with the chokeholder not letting up, and proceed to place their weight on him, despite his repeatedly and audibly gasping, “I can’t breathe.” (It was later revealed that the police’s violence triggered the man’s asthma.) The victim, 43-year-old Eric Garner, would say no more; he lost consciousness and died shortly thereafter. The aptly titled I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street, by well-known author and investigative journalist Matt Taibbi, is Garner’s story.

As an account of what happened that fateful day as well as an analysis of the “apparent thrown case by the district attorney’s office,” which seemed distinctly uninterested in obtaining an indictment of the chokeholding cop despite its professed intentions to the contrary,