Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict That Divided America | 
| Author: Eyal Press
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 766943
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 0312426577
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.460974797
EAN: 9780312426576
ASIN: 0312426577
Publication Date: February 20, 2007
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Product Description
A Booklist Editors' Choice of the Year On October 23, 1998, Barnett Slepian, an abortion provider in Buffalo, New York, was killed by a sniper's bullet. Days later, another local doctor, Shalom Press, received a threat that he was "next on the list." Within hours, the Press family was under police protection, and America's violent struggle over abortion had come to the blue-collar city of Buffalo. In Absolute Convictions, Press recounts his family's experience with protesters outside his father's clinic, patients who braved the gauntlet of demonstrators, and politicians who attempted to appease both sides. With remarkable sensitivity, Eyal Press "plunges into, and transcends, a polarized debate that makes partisans of us all" (The Nation).
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Very fair. Very thorough. Very well-written. February 21, 2008
ABSOLUTE CONVICTIONS is a surprisingly good book. It's thorough, fair, and well-written.
Mr. Eyal Press tells the story of abortion in Buffalo, New York. He tells the story of his Jewish family. He tells the history of Buffalo including the economy and politics and industry. He then weaves all this together with the abortion battle and how Buffalo was to became "the next big thing" in the abortion battle.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the "Rescue Movement" was actively blocking abortion clinics and using civil disobedience to stop abortion. After the massive "Summer of Mercy" protests in Wichita, Kansas in 1991, Pro-Life leaders set their sights on Buffalo. The Union-supporting Democrat mayor of Buffalo was Pro-Life and actually invited Operation Rescue to town to shut down the abortion clinics. A showdown followed during the 1992 "Spring of Life". But this time, the proabortion side would not be caught off-guard as they had been in Wichita. Things didn't got well for Pro-Lifers in Buffalo.
This book is amazingly fair. The author is the son of an abortionist, yet he is fair and honest and open with Pro-Lifers. Mr. Press doesn't demean or misrepresent the motives or dedication of Pro-Life activists... even those who blockaded his own father's abortion clinic. And Pro-Life activists were candid with him. This speaks volumes about the author's character. I am a Pro-Life activist, and I know how tightlipped we have learned to be when "journalists" want to interview us. Mr. Press had to earn the trust of Pro-Lifers which he obviously did.
Mr. Press talks about the shooting of a Buffalo abortionist in 1998, but he doesn't try to convey culpability upon those who were not involved... as some have vainly tried including Phyllida Howe who has also reviewed this book.
If you're seeking a self-affirming proabortion rant, then please look elsewhere. If you're wanting to read stale proabortion slogans, then buy something else. If you want to view the abortion battle through a warped, paranoid lens, then buy some other book. There are plenty proabortion books like that for sale.
I recommend this book for any abortion activist whether Pro-Life or proabortion.
The abortion wars aren't about choice - they are about dominance. August 29, 2006
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
I know Eyal Press. I know his father. I was there. All of the analyses from people who think this thing about abortion, that thing about feminism, something else about the religious right - none of that comes down to earth half so well as Eyal's book does for those of us who lived it. And who live it still.
Absolute Convictions tells the human story of the Press family's experience with the sheer hell that became Buffalo. No one realized in the early days that Buffalo was 'Ground Zero' in this battle. Who think Buffalo is central to anything? But it was the third hardest-hit city in America because it was Randall Terry's home turf by proxy - he had many a good friend in that town, and he and they made as much political hay as they could out of it. The venom and divisions they fostered ultimately erupted in a violence of such magnitude the city and the friends of Bart Slepian are still reeling 8 years later.
Only Eyal could find and ask those on the periphery of this virulence whether they have culpability in the butchering of a man who wasn't evil - just different from them in terms of where he placed his value for life. No one has asked the anti-abortion zealots that before, and the very question may have altered some of the future choices and actions these people make. Abortion opponents are ultimately low-sacrifice people: they think they are brave for giving up a few hours on Saturday morning or shivering in the cold, but they have remained merely smug finger-pointers. They are without reflection on their own morality, their own culpability, their own need to examine values and conscience. Eyal made at least one face up to the consequences of her actions. Perhaps more will follow.
Eyal makes it clear: Doctors who respect women's health and their right to choose the course of their lives are pro-life, too. They value adult, sentient human beings over what for them are still only potential humans. And on the turn of this difference, real people are dying.
Absolute Convictions lets us see inside the fanatacism, and it becomes frighteningly clear: no matter what happens to Roe, either the nation or the states with strong pro-choice positions will erupt once again. Absolute convictions don't just go away.
Absolutely riveting August 16, 2006
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Only in America does the controversy over abortions rage so openly and bitterly, never seeming to be settled or pushed off the front page for long. Long ignored by everyone except medical practitioners (doctors and midwives) and those who needed their services, it was thrust into the national public eye by the Roe v Wade decision January 22, 1983 when the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not prohibit abortions in the first trimester and also allowed for certain abortions in the second and third trimester. But before that time, the issue had come to a head in several states including New York.
"Absolute Convictions, My Father, a City, and the Conflict That Divided America" by Eyal Press tells the story of Eyal's father Dr. Shalom Press at the center of this controversy in Buffalo during the turbulent 70's, 80's and 90's. The book describes Dr. Press as anything but a fighter for a cause. He is more like the worker who shows up every day, day after day, because it is the thing to do. And his patients need him. He did not go into medicine to perform abortions but to deliver babies. Abortions simply came with the territory because some women would have other wise chosen unsafe, illegal abortions or suicide to terminate their pregnancies.
The book explores the wide gulf that exists between pro-choice and pro-life groups and the small but significant beliefs they share: women should be treated with respect and the fewer abortions, the better. The book also explores the tactics of right-to-life groups and how those tactics sometimes escalate the actions of a fringe element to commit murder to "prevent murder". For being so intimately tied to one side, as his father could easily have been one of the few doctors who have been killed for performing aborions, Eyal Press does a marvelous job in presenting both sides.
I found the book an outstanding example of telling the history of abortion in America in the late 20th century. And it makes a good case for why the issue won't soon fade into the past.
 Interesting book but can't buy the propaganda June 20, 2006
1 out of 22 found this review helpful
Of course Mr. Press views the abortion industry as an honorable profession. This book is an extremely biased justification of a horrible "procedure". I actually couldn't even finish the book.
MB Antics June 3, 2006
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
"The book is remarkably rational, reasonable, informative, and balanced."
Mr. West you might have kept your comments more focused. While I agree with you in large part you do a disservce to your opinions. I am not sure what incidence of VD has to do with what the otherwise admirable group of stats that you have gathered. Or for that matter, why you would bother dwelling in what is a murky a clearly impossible to settle personhood argument or an off-topic and probably paranoid Malthusian worry is beyond me. Nor are the reports that most women who have abortions free of psychological trauma any consolation to those that do.
Your key point deserves emphasis: the making of coercive law on the basis of the beliefs - mostly religious - of a subset of the population has no place in a free society. It would be nice though if we really lived in a free society.
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