Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History Review

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Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History Feature

Shortlisted for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography and the 2011 Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Book: “An ingenious and absorbing book. . . . It will permanently change the way we tell this troubled yet gripping story.”—Jonathan Spence

Hailed as “irrepressibly spirited and entertaining” (Pico Iyer, Time) and “a fascinating cultural survey” (Paul Devlin, Daily Beast), this provocative first biography of Charlie Chan presents American history in a way that it has never been told before. Yunte Huang ingeniously traces Charlie Chan from his real beginnings as a bullwhip-wielding detective in territorial Hawaii to his reinvention as a literary sleuth and Hollywood film icon. Huang finally resurrects the “honorable detective” from the graveyard of detested postmodern symbols and reclaims him as the embodiment of America’s rich cultural diversity. The result is one of the most critically acclaimed books of the year and a “deeply personal . . . voyage into racial stereotyping and the humanizing force of story telling” (Donna Seaman, Los Angeles Times). 35 black-and-white illustrations

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Evil Summer: Babe Leopold, Dickie Loeb, and the Kidnap-Murder of Bobby Franks (Elmer H Johnson & Carol Holmes Johnson Series in Criminology)

Evil Summer: Babe Leopold, Dickie Loeb, and the Kidnap-Murder of Bobby Franks (Elmer H Johnson & Carol Holmes Johnson Series in Criminology) Review

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Evil Summer: Babe Leopold, Dickie Loeb, and the Kidnap-Murder of Bobby Franks (Elmer H Johnson & Carol Holmes Johnson Series in Criminology) Feature

In 1924, fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks was abducted while walking home from school, killed by a chisel blow to his head, and later found stuffed in a culvert in a marshy wasteland at the Illinois-Indiana state line. Acid had been poured over his naked body. Evil Summer examines the shocking kidnapping and murder of Franks by two University of Chicago students, Nathan “Babe” Leopold and Richard “Dickie” Loeb, both from families of privilege.

In this new examination of the crime, author John Theodore takes readers into the minds of the two criminals as he focuses on three months in 1924. Theodore covers the killing, the confessions, the defense, and the sentencing surrounding the horrific murder, placing the killers’ actions and Clarence Darrow’s historic defense into the context of 1920s Chicago.

Theodore deftly investigates the psychological dimensions of the crime, revealing the murderers’ fantasies, relationships, sexuality, and motives. The author examines the killers’ past, outlining Loeb’s obsession with detective fiction and crime and his editorial on random killing—written at age nine—and Leopold’s nightly master-slave fantasies and fascination with Nietzsche.

Evil Summer, which includes twenty-three illustrations, meticulously traces the murder from inception to confession, including such details as the special-delivery ransom letter sent to Jacob Franks and the discovery of Leopold’s horn-rimmed eyeglasses lying on a railroad embankment near Bobby’s dead body. Theodore re-creates such scenes as the convergence of hundreds of people in front of the Franks home, Bobby’s body lying in a small white casket in the library, and Loeb being voyeuristically drawn to the home while Bobby’s classmates carry the casket to the hearse.

Worldwide press coverage reflected the public fascination with the case in what was then called “the trial of the century.” The story became a media circus: Chicago’s six daily newspapers battled vigorously for readers, two Daily News cub reporters became part of the story, and the Chicago Tribune carried a voting ballot asking readers whether radio station WGN should broadcast the courtroom spectacle. The changing drama was delivered to Chicagoans every morning and evening, and the public feasted on every press run.

More than a crime story, Evil Summer illuminates the dark side of American life in the 1920s, including the excesses of privileged youth, the troubled childhoods, the random victimization, the anti-Semitism, and the sexuality.

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American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, and the Birth of Hollywood

American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, and the Birth of Hollywood Review

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American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, and the Birth of Hollywood Feature

In this masterpiece of narrative history, acclaimed author Howard Blum evokes the original "crime of the century" and an aftermath even more dramatic than the crime itself–a seminal episode in America’s history that would spark national debate and draw into its orbit master sleuth William J. Burns, crusading lawyer Clarence Darrow, and industry-shaping filmmaker D. W. Griffith.

"Hugely engaging . . . has tremendous verve . . . American Lightning throws valuable new light on an episode that seems, for us today, particularly pertinent. Terrorism happened here." –Los Angeles Times

"A fast-moving, skillfully constructed account . . . Blum’s style is cinematic." –Chicago Sun-Times

"Compelling . . . a tense detective story." –Seattle Times

"A thumping-good drumroll of narrative history . . . the cross-country manhunt reads like a great mystery novel . . . Blum blows the dust off a page of America’s own incendiary past and brings it to pulsating life." –Dallas Morning News

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Wrightsman's Psychology and the Legal System

Wrightsman's Psychology and the Legal System Review

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Wrightsman's Psychology and the Legal System Feature

The author team for WRIGHTSMAN'S PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LEGAL SYSTEM, Seventh Edition combines complementary expertise, active research, writing careers, and real world experience (as consultants working within the legal system) to produce a comprehensive text that is unparalleled in scholarship and writing style. The authorship, research base and comprehensive coverage make this text popular with instructors and students. This text demonstrates the importance of psychology to understanding the legal system and the impact on individuals' everyday lives through the use of real cases and questions formed to create discussions of these cases

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A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial

A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial Review

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A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial Feature

"The native American Voltaire, the enemy of all puritans, the heretic in the Sunday school, the one-man demolition crew of the genteel tradition." -Alistair Cooke on H.L. Mencken

Fiercely intelligent, scathingly honest, and hysterically funny, H.L. Mencken’s coverage of the Scopes Monkey Trial so galvanized the nation that it eventually inspired a Broadway play and the classic Hollywood movie Inherit the Wind.

Mencken’s no-nonsense sensibility is still exciting: his perceptive rendering of the courtroom drama; his piercing portrayals of key figures Scopes, Clarence Darrow, and William Jennings Bryan; his ferocious take on the fundamentalist culture surrounding it all—including a raucous midnight trip into the woods to witness a secret “holy roller” service.

Shockingly, these reports have never been gathered together into a book of their own—until now.

A Religious Orgy In Tennessee includes all of Mencken’s reports for The Baltimore Sun, The Nation, and The American Mercury. It even includes his coverage of Bryan’s death just days after the trial—an obituary so withering Mencken was forced by his editors to rewrite it, angering him and leading him to rewrite it yet again in a third version even less forgiving than the first. All three versions are included, as is a complete transcript of the trial’s most legendary exchange: Darrow’s blistering cross-examination of Bryan.

With the rise of “intelligent design,” H.L. Mencken’s work has never seemed more unnervingly timely—or timeless.

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Attorney For The Damned: Edited By Arhtur Weinberg

Attorney For The Damned: Edited By Arhtur Weinberg Review

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Attorney For The Damned: Edited By Arhtur Weinberg Feature

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Attorney for the damned / edited and with notes by Arthur Weinberg : foreword by William O. Douglas

Attorney for the damned / edited and with notes by Arthur Weinberg : foreword by William O. Douglas Review

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No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System

No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System Review

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No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System Feature

Now in paperback, a devastating critique of race- and class-based inconsistencies in the American criminal justice system. In a hard-hitting study hailed by Publishers Weekly as "well-argued" and "passionate," leading constitutional scholar David Cole reveals that, despite a veneer of neutrality, race- and class-based double standards operate in virtually every criminal justice setting, from police behavior, to jury selection, to sentencing. These double standards allow the privileged to enjoy constitutional protections from police power without paying the costs associated with extending those protections across the board to minorities and the poor. But they also inflict even greater costs on society, by compromising the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, and by exacerbating racial divisions nationally. No Equal Justice offers specic suggestions for moving beyond the inconsistencies we have tolerated, and concludes with a powerful argument for rebuilding the sense of community that is so essential to a safe and healthy society.

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Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir

Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir Review

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Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir Feature

"When Darwin called his second book The Descent of Man instead of The Ascent of Man he was thinking of his progeny."

So declares Darwin's great-great grandson Matthew Chapman as he leaves behind his stressful career as a Hollywood screenwriter and travels to Dayton, Tennessee where in 1925 creationist opposition to the teaching of evolution in schools was played out in a famous legal drama, the Scopes Monkey Trial.

The purpose of this journey is to see if opinions have changed in the seventy- five intervening years. A defiant atheist, Chapman is confronted not only by the fundamentalist beliefs that continue to banish the theory of evolution but by his own spiritual malaise as the outward journey becomes an inward quest, a tragicomic "accidental memoir".

"First there was Charles Darwin, two yards long and nobody's fool. Then there was his son, my great-grandfather, Sir Francis Darwin, an eminent botanist. Then came my grandmother Frances, a modest poet who spent a considerable amount of time in rest-homes for depression From her issued my beloved mother, Clare, who was extremely short, failed to complete medical school, and eventually became an alcoholic. Then we get down to me. I'm in the movie business."

Trials of the Monkey combines travel writing and reportage, as Chapman records his encounters in the South, with history and the accidental memoir of a man full of mid-life doubts in a genre-breaking first book that is darkly funny, provocative and poignant.

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To Ride Pegasus

To Ride Pegasus Review

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To Ride Pegasus Feature

They were four extroardinary women who read minds, healed bodies, diverted disasters, foretold the future--and became pariahs in their own land. A talented, elite cadre, they stepped out of the everyday human race...to enter their own!

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