On July 17, 2014, a 43 year old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk after a police officer put him in an illegal chokehold during an arrest for selling bootleg cigarettes. The final moments of Garner's life were captured on video and seen by millions, and his agonized last words, "I can't breathe," became a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter protest movement. Matt Taibbi's retelling of these events liberates Garner from the abstractions of newspaper accounts and lets us see the man in full—with all his flaws and contradictions intact—while offering nuanced portraits of the policemen, the lawyers, and a mayor caught between activists and police officials.