Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America [Hardcover]

Eyal Press (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 21, 2006

On October 23, 1998, the Buffalo abortion provider Barnett Slepian was killed by a sniper's bullet fired through the kitchen window of his home. Days later, police informed another local doctor, Shalom Press, that they had received a threat warning that he was "next on the list." Within hours the Press household was under twenty-four-hour federal marshal protection. America's violent struggle over abortion - which had already claimed the lives of five doctors and clinic workers - had come to Buffalo.
In Absolute Convictions, Eyal Press returns to his hometown seeking to understand how an issue many people thought was settled decades ago could inspire such rage. Press combines a retelling of his family's experience with firsthand accounts of protesters arrested outside his father's office, patients who braved the gauntlet of demonstrators, and politicians who attempted to appease both sides. Through the Press family and the city of Buffalo, a blue-collar town undergoing wrenching economic changes, we see, as never before, the people behind the absolute convictions that have divided our nation for the past three decades.
With remarkable sensitivity, Press has written both a gripping narrative account of a family and a city caught in the crossfire of moral fervor and individual rights, and an incisive history that offers new insight into the economic and social roots of America's most volatile conflict.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this inside look at a battleground of the abortion debate—Buffalo, N.Y.—the son of an abortion provider examines both sides of the culture clash that envelops his Israeli father's life. Drawing comparisons with the religious fundamentalism of his father's homeland, Press takes the reader on a brisk, compelling tour of a city that saw both Operation Rescue's massive "Spring of Life" protests in 1992 and the 1998 murder of abortion provider Barnett Slepian. Both events swirled around the lives of Press's defiant father, Shalom, who "at the core of his identity" couldn't "back down in the face of a threat," and his mother, Carla, a Holocaust survivor who endured comparisons of abortion clinics to Nazi death camps. Part memoir and part reportage, Press's book provides a piercing look at local leaders of both camps and follows the dramatic arrest, confession and sentencing of Slepian's killer, James Kopp. While more insight into his father's experience would have enhanced the story, Press's incisive account of an immigrant family at the center of an American culture war is a gripping read. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

Press, the son of an abortion doctor in Buffalo, New York, provides a lucid social history of the city's abortion wars in an effort to explain the murder of one of his father's colleagues, Barnett Slepian, who was killed in 1998 by an anti-abortion activist named James Charles Kopp. The story begins three years before Roe v. Wade, when the New York State legislature decriminalized abortion, making the state a haven; in 1971, more than two hundred thousand women sought safe abortions in its hospitals. Press traces the rise of the evangelical anti-abortion movement in the Rust Belt and, in fresh interviews, gives fair hearing to the activists who spent much of the eighties blockading his father's medical office. He also examines dispassionately the psychology that drove Kopp to commit murder in the name of unborn life.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition edition (February 21, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805077316
• ISBN-13: 978-0805077315
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,537,708 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely riveting, August 15, 2006

By 

Arnold V. Loveridge (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America (Hardcover)

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.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The abortion wars aren't about choice - they are about dominance., August 28, 2006

By 

Phyllida Howe "choicelady" (Buffalo, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America (Hardcover)

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.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It may be the best on "life or choice", April 15, 2006

By 

Thomas A. Diederich (Kettering, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America (Hardcover)

Eyal Press is a gifted writer, free lance. This is his first book.
In less than 300 pages he tells of his home town Buffalo, New York where with his father he once routed for the Buffalo Bills.
He tells of the city which like so many in the 'rust belt" came on hard times. As a child he came from Israel with his parents. His mother surived the death camps of Hitler. HIs father,educated in medicine served the military.

Doctor Press moved to Buffalo and set up practice in OB/BYN along with a new colleague, Dr Barnette Slepian would later die in his home, shot by a Right to Life zealot Jams Kopp.

For those who insist that the abortion of a fetus is no less murder than this murder of a physician, husband and father--this book may be rejected. But I found it very fair, with compassion for all of us who care about our country and this awful division on such a personal matter.