Here are 100 books that Until I Could Be Sure fans have personally recommended if you like
Until I Could Be Sure.
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Journalism and history have been my dual obsessions since high school, and my work for the past 13 years has focused on the intersection between them. The pressures of journalism, its tremendous impact, and the extraordinary characters who tend to be drawn to the profession are endlessly fascinating to me. In my time as a PhD student, professor, researcher, and book review editor for an academic journal, I have read hundreds of books about American journalism and its past (maybe over 1,000 now that I think about it, but I haven’t kept count!). I’ve also reviewed several for the Washington Post. These are some of my favorites.
I’ve read a lot of journalism memoirs, but I love this one because it is unapologetically a book for journalism junkies. Hersh—arguably the greatest investigative reporter of the past century—is matter-of-fact and unsentimental as he looks back on his impressive career.
It’s all about the work: the incredible lengths to which you need to go to expose the damaging secrets that powerful people want to keep hidden. Reading his account of how he got the story of the My Lai Massacre, my jaw was open the entire time in near-disbelief.
'Reporter is just wonderful. Truly a great life, and what shines out of the book, amid the low cunning and tireless legwork, is Hersh's warmth and humanity. Essential reading for every journalist and aspiring journalist the world over' John le Carre
In the early 1950s, teenage Seymour Hersh was finishing high school and university - while running the family's struggling dry cleaning store in a Southside Chicago ghetto. Today, he is one of America's premier investigative journalists, whose fearless reporting has earned him fame, front-page bylines in virtually every newspaper in the world, a staggering collection of awards, and no…
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’ve always been drawn to stories about wrongful convictions. I can think of nothing worse than losing your freedom for something you did not do. More importantly, I think it’s important to hold those responsible accountable. I believe in the sentiment that it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to have one innocent man convicted.
This book deals with the death penalty. The author covers several cases involving people who were on death row and were subsequently found to be innocent.
The book also covers related topics, such as mass incarceration, mandatory sentencing, racial bias, prison overcrowding, cruel and unusual sentences for minors, the psychological impact of long-term solitary confinement, and a host of other crime and punishment issues.
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, STARRING MICHAEL B. JORDAN, JAMIE FOXX, AND BRIE LARSON.
A NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, ESQUIRE, AND TIME BOOK OF THE YEAR.
A #1 New York Times bestseller, this is a powerful, true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix America's broken justice system, as seen in the HBO documentary True Justice.
The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. One in every 15 people born there today is expected to go
to prison. For black men this figure rises to one…
I am a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has worked for the past 10 years as the senior researcher for the National Registry of Exonerations. In that capacity, I have written nearly 2,500 individual accounts of men and women and teenagers who were wrongly convicted of crimes they did not commit. Some of them were sentenced to death. I have seen and written about these tragedies firsthand.
Phoebe Zerwick has written an evocative account of the disturbing wrongful conviction and ultimate tragedy of Darryl Hunt in North Carolina. I personally know Phoebe and I am familiar with the story. It is a riveting account of how the criminal justice system can and does go awry with deadly consequences.
A deeply reported, gripping narrative of injustice, exoneration, and the lifelong impact of incarceration, Beyond Innocence is the poignant saga of one remarkable life that sheds vitally important light on the failures of the American justice system at every level
In June 1985, a young Black man in Winston-Salem, N.C. named Darryl Hunt was falsely convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of a white copyeditor at the local paper. Many in the community believed him innocent and crusaded for his release even as subsequent trials and appeals reinforced his sentence. Finally, in 2003, the…
Trapped in our world, the fae are dying from drugs, contaminants, and hopelessness. Kicked out of the dark fae court for tainting his body and magic, Riasg only wants one thing: to die a bit faster. It’s already the end of his world, after all.
I am a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has worked for the past 10 years as the senior researcher for the National Registry of Exonerations. In that capacity, I have written nearly 2,500 individual accounts of men and women and teenagers who were wrongly convicted of crimes they did not commit. Some of them were sentenced to death. I have seen and written about these tragedies firsthand.
Chris Fabricant has written a compelling account of how the “junk science” of connecting bitemarks to human teeth has resulted in dozens of wrongful convictions of innocent people in America. I have known Chris for many years. He is a fierce advocate for truth and justice. This book powerfully exposes how forensic dentists have used methods with no scientific basis to convict the wrong people and the guilty people went free.
Innocence Project attorney M. Chris Fabricant presents an insider’s journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role junk science plays in maintaining the status quo.
Praise from John Grisham, author of A Time for Mercy: "No one in America will ever know the number of innocent people convicted, sent to prison, and even executed because of the flood of rotten forensics and bogus scientific opinions presented to juries. In this intriguing and beautifully crafted book, Innocence Project lawyer M. Chris Fabricant illustrates how wrongful convictions occur, and he makes it obvious how they could…
I’m a law professor at Boston University who has studied and written about constitutional law, democracy, and inequality for over 20 years. I’m troubled by America’s rise to become the world’s leader in imprisoning its own citizens and the continued use of inhumane policing and punishment practices. These trends must be better understood before we can come up with a form of politics that can overcome our slide into a darker version of ourselves.
This
book is based on more than 35 years of experience litigating capital
punishment cases in the Deep South.
Bright, who led the Southern Center for Human Rights, and his co-author
James Kwak, go deep into the belly of the criminal justice system and
assess how poverty and race affect everything from a prosecutor’s
charging decisions to how juries are selected to
sentencing decisions. An important takedown.
A legendary lawyer and a legal scholar reveal the structural failures that undermine justice in our criminal courts
"An urgently needed analysis of our collective failure to confront and overcome racial bias and bigotry, the abuse of power, and the multiple ways in which the death penalty's profound unfairness requires its abolition. You will discover Steve Bright's passion, brilliance, dedication, and tenacity when you read these pages." -from the foreword by Bryan Stevenson
Glenn Ford, a Black man, spent thirty years on Louisiana's death row for a crime he did not commit. He was released in 2014-and given twenty dollars-when…
Stories of people impacted by the criminal justice system have been key to my understanding of the system and my efforts to reform it. I knew I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer when, in law school, I represented a woman who was raped by a corrections officer in a federal prison in Connecticut. My experiences suing the police and corrections officers as a young lawyer in New York inspired 15+ years researching the realities of civil rights litigation and barriers to achieve justice. I believe that the best way to understand the realities of the criminal justice system is through the experiences of people trying to make their way through it.
Charged reveals criminal prosecutors’ massive power and discretion.
And Emily Bazelon makes the stakes and consequences of this massive power and discretion come alive by telling the stories of two people charged with two different crimes by two different prosecutors.
By tracking every step of each case—from arrest to charging to trial to sentencing—she shows the harms the overzealous prosecutors can impose, as well as the mercy prosecutors can show. And she traces the work of progressive prosecutors across the country, offering an alternative path forward.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A renowned journalist and legal commentator exposes the unchecked power of the prosecutor as a driving force in America’s mass incarceration crisis—and charts a way out.
“An important, thoughtful, and thorough examination of criminal justice in America that speaks directly to how we reduce mass incarceration.”—Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy
“This harrowing, often enraging book is a hopeful one, as well, profiling innovative new approaches and the frontline advocates who champion them.”—Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted
FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS BOOK PRIZE •…
Everyday Medical Miracles
by
Joseph S. Sanfilippo (editor),
Frontiers of Women from the healthcare perspective. A compilation of 60 true short stories written by an extensive array of healthcare providers, physicians, and advanced practice providers.
All designed to give you, the reader, a glimpse into the day-to-day activities of all of us who provide your health care. Come…
When my sister was suddenly arrested in 2017, I was thrust into an upside-down world where I had to quickly understand the severe domestic violence that she had been hiding, while also understanding the criminal legal system that was prosecuting her for killing her abuser. In order to do so, I immersed myself in experts and literature, eventually writing a memoir about the experience. These five books personally helped me understand the full scope of violence against women, whether perpetrated by an abusive person or an abusive system.
Mariama Kaba’s book stands alongside Emily L. Thuma’s All Our Trials as essential reading to understand the long history of ordinary people taking action to help liberate women from a system designed to punish those who dare to survive men’s violence.
This book is instructive, inspirational, and urgently needed in our current political climate. It’s a reminder that collective organizing is where citizens hold power, and Mariame Kaba is a leader who can help show us the way.
"Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you're going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to."
What if social transformation and liberation isn't about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In…
I am a Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where I teach in the Department of African American Studies and the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. I also direct the UCLA Lab for BioCritical Studies and am the principal investigator of the Coroner Report Project within the UCLA Lab for BioCritical Studies. My research team is documenting how the death investigation system is failing to tell us the truth about Americans who lose their lives in jail and during arrest. I've written about this problem in several reports, journal articles, and now my latest book, The Coroner's Silence.
Gilmore's Golden Gulag helps us see why California is one of the wealthiest economies on the planet, but also home to the largest carceral system in the world.
She connects the evaporation of the social safety net and disruptions to stable employment by global capitalism to provide the answer: California uses prisons to absorb the surplus labor created by the greed, racism, and inequality of the global economy.
Read this book, and you will understand why, in my book, so many people I wrote about were pushed through our carceral system in California and never returned home.
Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called 'the biggest prison building project in the history of the world'. "Golden Gulag" provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how…
I am a professor of history and Director of the Lawton M. Chiles Jr. Center for Florida History at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida. I am a specialist in Southern, social, criminal justice, and legal history. I am the author or co-author of seven books, including three that address criminal justice at the state and federal level. My articles and reviews on criminal justice history have appeared in the America Historical Review, American Journal of Legal History, Journal of Southern History, Florida Historical Quarterly, Florida Bar Journal, and Georgia Historical Quarterly.
Of the many books that explore African-Americans’ experience in the South’s antebellum Criminal Justice System this work stands out. In this comprehensive study of the criminal justice system of a slave state. Glenn McNair traces the evolution of Georgia’s legal culture by examining its use of slave codes and slave patrols, as well as presenting data on crimes prosecuted, trial procedures and practices, conviction rates, the appellate process, and punishment. Based on more than four hundred capital cases, McNair’s study deploys both narrative and quantitative analysis to get at both the theory and the reality of the criminal procedure for slaves in the century leading up to the Civil War.
Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia's Criminal Justice System is the most comprehensive study of the criminal justice system of a slave state to date. McNair traces the evolution of Georgia's legal culture by examining its use of slave codes and slave patrols, as well as presenting data on crimes prosecuted, trial procedures and practices, conviction rates, the appellate process, and punishment. Based on more than four hundred capital cases, McNair's study deploys both narrative and quantitative analysis to get at both the theory and the reality of the criminal procedure for slaves in the century leading up…
Karl's War is a coming-of-age-meets-thriller set in Germany on the eve of Hitler coming to power. Karl – a reluctant poster boy for the Nazis – meets Jewish Ben and his world is up-turned.
Ben and his family flee to France. Karl joins the German army but deserts and finds…
In my graduate studies, I had a fantastic professor who was able to make the politics of international criminal justice one of my favorite subjects. The intersection of law, politics, peace, and conflict pulled me in. But the fact that it also touches on human rights, state sovereignty, and the prevention of mass atrocities got me hooked. I ended up doing extensive research on the International Criminal Court and how it interacts with UN peace operations, and I have subsequently been teaching peace and justice at Leiden University. I publish regularly on these topics as well and am the associate editor of International Peacekeeping, one of the leading journals on international conflict management.
If you want to have an informed conversation about the effectiveness of international criminal justice, it is vital to understand two things. One, that whether or not it’s effective entirely depends on how you measure ‘effectiveness’. And two, that the local context in which an international court operates is going to have a major effect on how effective it can be at anything.
I enjoyed Wierda’s book because she clearly works out these important starting points and studies the ICC’s impact in four very different countries: Afghanistan, Colombia, Libya and Uganda. She also is careful to distinguish between different kinds of effectiveness (systemic, transformative, reparative and demonstrative), enabling us to have much more sophisticated conversations about the results of ICC interventions.
The International Criminal Court seeks to end impunity for the world's worst crimes, to contribute to their prevention. But what is its impact to date? This book takes an in-depth look at four countries under scrutiny of the ICC: Afghanistan, Colombia, Libya, and Uganda. It puts forward an analytical framework to assess the impact of the ICC on four levels: on the domestic legal systems (systemic effect); on peace negotiations and agreements (transformative effect); on victims (reparative effect); and on the perceptions of affected populations (demonstration effect). It concludes that the ICC is having a normative impact on domestic legal…
