Reviewed by Rita Radostitz

In November 1988, a group of three white skinheads beat to death an Ethiopian immigrant on a dark street in Portland, Oregon. In the prologue to her book A Hundred Little Hitlers, Elinor Langer describes the essence of why she, a self described Jewish liberal, would write a book detailing the rise of the skinhead movement in this country: She believes that the true and complete story of the skinhead killing of Mulugeta Seraw has not been told because the story was told only through the prism of the legal system, and was tainted by the immediate labeling of the crime as a racially motivated killing.

Langer spent more than a decade pouring over the documentation of the incident, interviewing the various people involved with the crime and its investigation, and chronicling the history of the skinhead movement. She does a wonderful job with some of the historical background -- the section documenting the history of racism in Oregon is particularly compelling. But when she turns her eye to the lives of the primary actors, she seems to forget that the gift of a great storyteller is measured by her ability to cull the important details from those which are merely interesting. We learn more than we need to about the lives of Ken Mieske (the man who wielded the bat that killed Seraw); Ken Metzger (the leader of White Aryan Resistance) and Morris Dees (the attorney and founder of Southern Poverty Law Center which filed a civil suit against Metzger and others on behalf of Seraw's family.)

A Hundred Little Hitlers is a passionate discourse on the impact of one racist act on a community with a long history of racism trying to transcend its past. Ms. Langer sets out to tell the story without the slant that she believes the legal system provided. Because she has her own slant, it is hard to tell if she succeeds.