Lazarus and the Hurricane: The Freeing of Rubin ""Hurricane"" Carter

A pair of new releases accompany the upcoming release of the movie The Hurricane, in which Denzel Washington plays former top middleweight boxing contender Rubin Carter, who spent 20 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. This entry, billing itself as ""a basis"" for the film, was originally published in Canada in 1991 and now appears with a new, three-page epilogue. Written by two Canadians who, despite no formal legal training, joined the legal battle to free Carter, it has the advantage of an unusual inside perspective. Imprisoned in 1967 for the slaying of two white men and a white woman the previous year, Carter had already published a memoir (The Sixteenth Round), become a cause c l bre and inspired the Bob Dylan song ""Hurricane"" when Chaiton and Swinton stumbled upon his story in the late 1970s. He had also been retried and reconvicted. The authors were led to Carter's story through Lesra Martin, a young black man they befriended on a trip to Brooklyn and whom they invited to be a part of their commune in Toronto where they had been ""living together in harmony for almost ten years."" A letter from Martin, whose first name is a corruption of Lazarus, to the fighter established a connection that resulted in the authors eventually moving to New Jersey to become full-time members of Carter's legal research team. Although it's a serviceable chronicle of Carter's fight for freedom, the book is strangely lacking in the passionate intimacy of an insider. Written in the third person, the text regularly refers to the authors themselves and their friends as ""the Canadians."" It asserts that they would ""do anything"" to help Carter's cause, but it doesn't shed much light, beyond an implied desire to right wrong, on their motivation. (Jan.)