The Shooting of Rabbit Wells: A White Cop, a Young Man of Color, and an American Tragedy

by William Loizeaux

Book Overview

What put a white cop and a black youth on a tragic collision course? This moving account is more timely than ever. On a frigid winter's night in 1973, William "Rabbit" Wells, a young man of mixed... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1628725958
• ISBN13: 9781628725957
• Release Date: September 2015
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 4.9" x 7.1"

Customer Reviews

if you knew rabbit, you knew what the book was saying.

my husband knew rabbit. the book covered as much as william loizeaux could tell. there was a great part missing from the book. we are hoping that the author contact several other friends of rabbit's and do a sequil. There is just so much more to tell of this young lad whose life was ended so young and yet so drastically.

I knew everyone there !

I just finished reading The Shooting of Rabbit Wells by William Loizeaux. I finished it in a few hours !! It was of particular interest to me because I grew up in Bernardsville and I knew just about everyone mentioned in the book, especially , the victim, Rabbit..... the book traces his pitiful life from the day he was born and I learned alot about him I never knew from our fleeting friendship. I met Rabbit when he was a Bonnie Brae boy through my boyfriend at the time, who was also on Bonnie Brae. Thirty years later that old boyfriend and I are still friends.....Bernardsville was truly a small quaint town at that time. This incident brought us all to the realization that things were not all flower power and love like we thought. The book really drives that point home in telling about the youth refuge "The Oaken Bucket" in Basking Ridge and how everyone used to cruise and hang out at Woolworth's and the Shop-Rite area. We were a bunch of suburbian hippies just hanging out !! Then the town started to change with outsiders coming in and causing trouble. The incident described in the book changed our innocent lives forever. Many people moved away shortly after that and tried to forget what happened but William Loizeaux didn't and I thank him for that. I would like to be able to talk to William myself and see if he'd like to work on a sequel about the Bernardsville "kids". Many of us are still in touch with each other and have alot to say !!!! Thanks William for a fabulous look into Rabbit's private life and a transport back to the Three Lights Tavern where I spent many a weekend !!!

Lovingly dedicated? a wondrous, inventive landmark.

In his ravishing new book, "The Shooting of RabbitWells", author William Loizeaux stuns the reader with hismasterful, risky, and innovative blend of forms that create a stirring recount of a very real tragedy. Any reader who has lived in the last thirty years, will recognize the turning points of our lives, that contributed to the 1973 killing in Bernardsville, New Jersey, of a mixed-race man named Rabbit Wells. "The Shooting of Rabbit Wells" is a lovingly dedicated, nakedly honest and wondrous, inventive landmark in the art of writing. The author's probing instinct, which includes a notable talent in exploring our innermost, infuses the book with a magic that holds us captive. We reconsider our pasts, futures, wonder at our fortitude, and more, at our determined, unreleasing grip on that which we will not, or cannot, forget. A reading of this book has the radiance and light of a magnificent, beloved dream. Sometimes one awakens from a vivid dream, astonished, confused, relieved or perhaps disappointed-- that it "was all just a dream". But when real tragedy befalls, we humans share an obverse experience, where oddly, reality seems plainly dream-like. Every moment, detail, association, memory and truth are so unanticipated, so brutally changing, that we never forget, forever reliving and resorting a mull of slow-motion fragments. We stumble and wander as troubled, nomadic philosophers. We sporadically blurt out to anyone who might listen; or perhaps delude ourselves that we've forgotten, that the pain has passed. We wander ever doomed, attempting to piece together what we know is unpieceable, these dear and treasured fragments that we, in one moment, both accept as truth and fail to comprehend. "The Shooting of Rabbit Wells" deftly leads us backward and forward through time, space, water, earth, and society, driving us down the roads that, to this day, lead us to Rabbit Wells. Loizeaux makes the drive a stimulating, compass-twisting journey. We come to recognize the deep pride and dedication we feel in the haunting, and daunting, task of simply remembering. It was a joy, honor and privilege to have read this book. And to the author, I am most assuredly, deeply grateful. Bravo.