Here are 76 books that Picking Cotton fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve written about, taught, and litigated wrongful conviction cases for decades. As Director and Co-Founder of the California Innocence Project, I was able to walk 40 innocent people out of prison. I’m proud to have been part of a small group of lawyers who started innocence organizations in the 1990s. That small group has now turned into a global movement. Free the innocents!
This book broke my heart. A college student goes for an exciting semester in Italy and has to deal with the tragic murder of her roommate, her own wrongful arrest for the crime, an internationally covered trial where she is portrayed as a monster, and more than four years in prison for a crime she did not commit.
I love this book because it not only tells the story of a wrongful conviction but is also the best book I have read about the prison experience that women around the world go through. It is beautifully written and tough to put down.
As seen in the Nextflix documentary Amanda Knox, in March 2015, the Supreme Court of Italy exonerated Amanda Knox, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Waiting To Be Heard. In an afterward to this newly issued paperback edition, Amanda updates readers on her life since 2011, introduces the individuals who helped her persevere as her case continued through the Italian courts, and shares her plans for helping others who have also been wrongfully convicted.
In November 2007, 20 year-old Amanda Knox had only been studying in Perugia, Italy, for a few weeks when her friend and roommate, British…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I’ve written about, taught, and litigated wrongful conviction cases for decades. As Director and Co-Founder of the California Innocence Project, I was able to walk 40 innocent people out of prison. I’m proud to have been part of a small group of lawyers who started innocence organizations in the 1990s. That small group has now turned into a global movement. Free the innocents!
This book is unique in the world of wrongful conviction books because it is written by a former prosecutor. Mark Godsey gives readers an inside view of how innocence often gives way to winning trial records and promotions based on successful prosecutions in the competitive world of prosecutions.
Godsey tells this story from the perspective of not just a former prosecutor but also the current Director of one of the most successful innocence organizations in the world, where he has exonerated dozens of innocent people. The stories of his clients and his career transition are insightful and heartbreaking.
In this unprecedented view from the trenches, prosecutor turned champion for the innocent Mark Godsey takes us inside the frailties of the human mind as they unfold in real-world wrongful convictions. Drawing upon shocking, yet true, stories from his own career, Godsey shares how innate psychological flaws and the "tough on crime" political environment experienced by judges, police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and juries can cause investigations to go awry, leading to the convictions of innocent people. Each chapter explores a distinct psychological human weakness inherent in the criminal justice system-confirmation bias, memory malleability, credibility-determining errors, tunnel vision, cognitive dissonance, bureaucratic…
I’ve written about, taught, and litigated wrongful conviction cases for decades. As Director and Co-Founder of the California Innocence Project, I was able to walk 40 innocent people out of prison. I’m proud to have been part of a small group of lawyers who started innocence organizations in the 1990s. That small group has now turned into a global movement. Free the innocents!
Brian Banks was one of the best high school football players in the country when he was wrongfully arrested at the age of 16 years old for raping a classmate. He went to prison, and a decade later, his accuser admitted it never happened. I love this book because it gives a first-person view of what a child goes through when they are eaten alive by the criminal legal system.
It is also a great book about hope and determination. Brian never gives up on his dreams and ultimately lives them on an NFL field after more than a decade-long ordeal. This book has something for everyone.
Discover the unforgettable and inspiring true story of a young man who was wrongfully convicted as a teenager and imprisoned for more than five years, only to emerge with his spirit unbroken and determined to achieve his dream of playing in the NFL.
At age sixteen, Brian Banks was a nationally recruited All-American Football player, ranked eleventh in the nation as a linebacker. Before his seventeenth birthday, he was in jail, awaiting trial for a heinous crime he did not commit.
Although Brian was innocent, his attorney advised him that as a…
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
I’ve written about, taught, and litigated wrongful conviction cases for decades. As Director and Co-Founder of the California Innocence Project, I was able to walk 40 innocent people out of prison. I’m proud to have been part of a small group of lawyers who started innocence organizations in the 1990s. That small group has now turned into a global movement. Free the innocents!
I love this book because it is incredibly educational about the problem of wrongful convictions in baby death cases, but at the same time, that education is wrapped around the ordeal of a young woman caught up in a wrongful conviction.
I have litigated baby death cases, and I know the circle of heartbreak around them. Audrey Edmunds captures that heartbreak as we follow her on her journey from a daycare provider on a normal day to prison for 11 years to freedom.
Audrey Edmunds was a happily married young mother of two with a baby on the way; the neighborhood soccer mom in a small Wisconsin town providing casual childcare when the unthinkable happened. An infant died in her care at the same time the unknown science of Shaken Baby Syndrome hit the media. Swept up in a media frenzy, Edmunds was accused of killing the child through SBS. She was stripped from her children and husband and sent to prison where she would fight for freedom 13 years before she was finally exonerated after updated science showed her innocence. Audrey was…
I started learning about the Great Forest in the early 1980s, when my husband and I homesteaded a 100 acre woodlot in the Allegheny Mountains of Virginia. Our long back border is with the 1.2 million acres of the George Washington National Forest. So, from the beginning, we straddled the philosophical and ethical differences between private and public lands. As we learned about the devastation done to the Appalachian Mountain forests by private owners who cared for nothing but money, we took lessons from the past to form our own forest management plan aimed at avoiding such excesses. And we became advocates for the protection of national forests from any repeat of the past.
European settlers brought the ancient tradition of the forest commons, in which peasants could gather firewood, hunt small game, and cut forage for livestock regardless of what aristocrat owned the land. It was a matter of survival.
I’ve heard Appalachians be accused of anti-environmentalism, but through interviews, attending meetings and protests, and deep research, Newfont shows how people of the Blue Ridge see national forests as a commons, and have fought to preserve those forests against destructive practices such as clear-cutting and oil and gas development.
This book helped me understand that the national forests are a modern commons, providing enormous benefits like clean air and water to all of society.
In the late twentieth century, residents of the Blue Ridge mountains in western North Carolina fiercely resisted certain environmental efforts, even while launching aggressive initiatives of their own. Kathryn Newfont examines the environmental history of this region over the course of three hundred years, identifying what she calls commons environmentalism-a cultural strain of conservation in American history that has gone largely unexplored.
Efforts in the 1970s to expand federal wilderness areas in the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests generated strong opposition. For many mountain residents the idea of unspoiled wilderness seemed economically unsound, historically dishonest, and elitist. Newfont shows that…
I grew up in a mostly white town in Ohio, where, as a White woman, I didn’t have to think much at all about race. During college in North Carolina, I first began to consider racism. As a journalist, I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) that you can’t write in a meaningful way about social justice issues without connecting them to history. The books I’ve recommended provide that connection. Once you make it, you’ll never be able to see the world the same way.
Wilmington’s Lie, winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, documents one of the darkest episodes in North Carolina’s history – the violent overthrow of an elected government in the Black-majority city of Wilmington. It was a massacre that left at least 60 Black men dead. I lived in North Carolina for decades before I heard about this history. And I’m hardly alone. Until recently, this coup had been described as a “race riot” and largely omitted from textbooks, while its White supremacist organizers had been revered as great North Carolinians. If you want to understand what people mean when they talk about the “whitewashing” of American history, this book is the ultimate case study.
WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NONFICTION
From Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino comes a searing account of the Wilmington riot and coup of 1898, an extraordinary event unknown to most Americans
By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina’s largest city and a shining example of a mixed-race community. It was a bustling port city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a Fusionist government of Republicans and Populists that included black aldermen, police officers and magistrates. There were successful black-owned businesses and an African American newspaper, The Record. But across the state—and the South—white supremacist Democrats were…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
I have been writing all my life, but was never able to find my voice until I had my daughters. It was for them I wrote “Wrightsville Beach”. I wanted to show them what a good relationship should look like and how their decisions make a difference in where they will go. I want my readers to relive that feeling of falling in love and to be sent in unexpected directions, as life so often does to us. I want you to enjoy it so much, you don’t want to put the book down until it’s finished and once you do, to sit and reflect on it, savoring the feeling it has left behind.
Ronnie is everything a teenage girl should be—independent, sharp, and fierce. Will, the local guy who has it all, is drawn to her unique spirit. He sees through her defiance as they bond over Ronnie’s desire to save a sea turtle’s nest from predators. Over the course of their summer romance, Ronnie learns that Will’s life is not what she expected. In return, Will helps Ronnie make some discoveries of her own. This book is close to my heart in that you see how Ronnie learns how to channel her spirit from being rebellious to guiding her life in a more positive direction. She is similar to Jess in that she rises to the challenges presented to her and we see what a difference her decisions make in getting her to where she belongs.
Seventeen-year-old Veronica 'Ronnie' Miller's life was turned upside-down when her parents divorced and her father moved from New York City to Wilmington, North Carolina. Three years later, she remains angry and alienated from her parents, especially her father . . . until her mother decides it would be in everyone's best interest if she spent the summer in Wilmington with him. Ronnie's father, a former concert pianist and teacher, is living a quiet life in the beach town, immersed in creating a work of art that will become the centerpiece of a local church.
I’m a former newspaper reporter turned cozy mystery writer, tea blogger, and cookbook author. If there’s a book with tea in it, count me in. I love the beverage itself, the ritual of teatime, tea parties, collecting tea wares, and growing tea (I grow camellia sinensis at home). Of all the hobbies and passions I’ve had, exploring all things tea is the one that never gets old. And so far, I’ve managed to include at least a bit of tea in every book I’ve written.
In her Seaside Café Mysteries, Bree Baker has conjured a thoroughly modern tea shop with Surf, Sand, and Tea, a business located in an old Victorian home on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Everly Swan (fun name!) has lots of varieties of iced tea on offer, and two elderly aunts bring some well-plotted family history into the mix. This series gives a modern-day spin to the tearoom enterprise, and this seven-book series ended far too soon for my taste.
In the second book of the popular Seaside Café Mysteries, No Good Tea Goes Unpunished, Everly Swan caters a high-profile beach wedding where the groom doesn't make it to the altar before the wedding bells ring.
Hitting All the sweet-tea spots, this series is:
A delightful Tea Shop and Café Culinary Mystery
The ideal cozy beach read
Perfect for fans of Laura Childs and Kate Carlisle
Catering her childhood friend's beachfront wedding was a dream come true for Sun, Sand and Tea Shop and Café owner Everly Swan—and the hundreds of guests in attendance would be great exposure for her…
A recovering newspaper journalist, I’ve lived and worked in Raleigh, North Carolina, since 1991, after growing up in Texas and Colorado. Professionally, I spent 28 years at Raleigh’s daily paper the News & Observer, primarily as a music critic, before taking my leave of the newspaper industry in 2019. Since then, I have gotten by as a freelancer writing for magazines, arts councils, alumni publications, and such. I also host a podcast – Carolina Calling, about North Carolina’s music history – while writing the occasional book. I’m also a member of the University of Colorado’s Trivia Bowl Hall Of Fame.
While I got to watch a lot of North Carolina music history unfold in real time, a great deal of it happened before I was born.
Fortunately, when it came to Piedmont blues, I had the work of English folklorist Bruce Bastin to draw on. With Cryin’ for the Carolinas and its 1986 companion volume Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast, Bastin gives an essential portrait of the 1930s vintage scene in Durham, North Carolina.
A large cast of iconic blues musicians, many of them disabled, got by busking in and around the city’s tobacco warehouses back then, legends like Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Rev. Gary Davis, and Blind Boy Fuller – who wrote the song that became my book title.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I have long been curious about why we eat the way we do, and how that is shaped by culture and history. I grew up in an immigrant family in a pretty homogenous place in the American South, so our diet was a marker of difference that I noticed as early as kindergarten. I also was curious about how entrenched the fast food, convenience food mode of American eating was, despite it being a pretty new phenomenon. These interests led me to study food history and environmental history and to become a professor in these fields. Reading books about these topics had opened my eyes to a whole hidden world!
Wow, reading this book is tragic and illuminating all at once.
I had never heard about the Hamlet Fire, during which twenty-five people died in a chicken-processing plant in North Carolina in 1991, before reading this book.
But the story of this industrial disaster answered so many questions about how deregulation, reduced labor and environmental protections, racism, and a desire for cheap food came together in this disaster—one that sheds light on the broader problems of the modern American food system.
For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses in search of cheap labor and almost no oversight. Imperial Food Products was one of those businesses. The company set up shop in Hamlet in the 1980s. Workers who complained about low pay and hazardous working conditions at the plant were silenced or fired. But jobs were scarce in town, so workers kept coming back, and the company continued to operate with impunity. Then, on the morning of September 3, 1991,…
