24 Hours in Charlottesville

April 17, 2023
That the 2017 Unite the Right rally—in which “hundreds of white supremacists and neo-Nazis” paraded through the streets of Charlottesville, Va., shouting “Jews will not replace us!”—descended into “extreme violence” should not have been a surprise, according to this visceral history of the protest and its aftermath. Drawing on dozens of interviews with journalists, residents, and activists, CNN producer Neus (coauthor, Muhammad Najem, War Reporter) reveals that police and municipal officials ignored repeated warnings that people might get hurt and seemed to offer more accommodations to the rally’s organizers than to counterprotesters. Interviewees also delve into the city’s racial dynamics (“It’s a very beautiful place, physically, with a very ugly underside, of poverty, inequality”) and the “very whitewashed version of American history” taught at the University of Virginia. Some of the book’s most powerful testimony comes from the mother of Heather Heyer, who was killed when a white supremacist slammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. Neus’s ground-up approach paints the violence as a slow-motion catastrophe that could have been avoided, though the free speech issues involved get somewhat short shrift. Still, this is a moving and frequently enraging look at how the tragedy unfolded.

July 1, 2023
Author Neus--who field-produced Anderson Cooper's CNN coverage of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia--reconstructs, almost hour-by-hour, the horrific events that played out over that August 11-12, as shared by city officials, local clergy, townspeople, first responders, and University of Virginia administrators, faculty members, and student counterprotesters; alt-right participants were not interviewed. In a haunting precursor to the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, what unfolded was a tragic inability of local officials to anticipate the violent intent of alt-right protesters, which led to inept planning, a police force ill-equipped to manage the situation, officials--like the city's mayor--frozen out of making decisions that could have lowered the temperature between opposing groups, and scores of injuries, including one death. Officials and counterprotesters express their regret, even guilt, at their inability to prevent the carnage resulting from the rally. Yet as Neus' wrenchingly graphic account makes clear, it was the malign, violent intent brought to the situation by the white supremacist participants that would drive the events of that awful weekend.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 15, 2023
A riveting account of the human consequences of the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Journalist Neus, who field-produced the rally for Anderson Cooper's CNN program, uses the voices of counterprotesters, local clergy, elected officials, University of Virginia students, and journalists to lay bare the collective anxieties engendered by "alt-right" protesters. The result is a gripping narrative of psychological and physical damage, laid out vividly by Neus via the voices of those on the ground. On May 13, according to the Heaphy report, White nationalists in KKK regalia "formed into ranks...in front of the statue of Robert E. Lee and chanted 'blood and soil, ' 'you will not replace us, ' and 'Russia is our friend.' " In July, notes the UVA dean of students, "the flyers for the Unite the Right rally had started showing up and they had very neo-Nazi imagery, a fascist eagle." According to the chaplain at a local hospital, medical professionals "were preparing for mass casualties." On the night of Aug. 11, White supremacists marched to campus, and a UVA professor "saw 150, 200 neo-Nazis with torches....The students were in a circle, locked arms around the [Thomas Jefferson] statue." The next night, noted a student, "a group of white supremacists, some with their hands taped like boxers, punched, kicked, and choked people who tried to block their path, leaving them bloody on the pavement." Amid the turmoil, a counterprotestor and former member of Congress recalls, "The shocking thing...was that [the fighting] went on for like three hours and the police still hadn't moved in." When the police finally did arrive, they pushed the marchers into a crowd of counterprotestors. A local clergyman remembers: "What we had for hours after that were bands of Nazis roaming through downtown." Another: "There was blood everywhere." Not just a visceral portrayal of political violence, but also a major addition to our understanding of right-wing terrorism.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.