20.05.12
The books weaves the story of six members of the Shomrim who were charged with a litany of crimes, leading up to a gang assault felony charge. The Shomrim Six, as they became known, also faced a 150 million dollar lawsuit in civil court. The night in question, a calm night, entailed an argument over a mattress for a guest in the a messianist Yeshiva, which turned into an all out brawl. From there, the details get hazier, despite the prescience of one of the students to tape the whole matter. The trial would drag on, and appear to anyone from the outside as a normal trial of unleashed violence, but Shaer opens the reader to the deep complexity of the case.
Shaer began as the editor of his college newspaper and worked his way up through the Boston Globe, then the Christian Science Monitor, up to writing for New York Magazine and Harper’s where an article on the same topic of the book was published back in January of this year. His articles, nowadays, tend towards more immersive narratives about aspects of society we otherwise might not know about, all attended to with an exquisite eye for detail. So that, “like Calvin Trillin and William Vollman,” some of Shaer’s more admired and beloved authors, “who are masters of the accumulated detail, the meticulously-observed world. They drown you. In a good way.” The same should be said of Shaer and his work.
Source: Jewcy.com (blog)