Books like Until You Are Dead

In one of my very favorite books of the past twenty years, Tim Tyson describes the brutal racist murder of a Black man in small-town North Carolina in 1970. He also goes into the aftermath, which Tim personally observed with the eyes of the ten-year-old son of the town’s Methodist minister. His father tried sincerely, with little success, to bridge the town’s racial divide as militant young Blacks took to the streets, burning warehouses. Tim is a remarkably poignant storyteller, and every page is stamped with his compassion, his wit, his keen eye for human nature. And most especially, with the wisdom that he learned from his father over the years. Some folks have compared it with To Kill a Mockingbird, and I definitely agree. And on a personal note, Tim’s father, Reverend Dr. Vernon Tyson, was a friend of my family for many years.

This book tells of the shocking axe murder of a white woman in rural Virginia in 1895, and the trials of three Black women who were accused of the crime. Given the time and place, you would not expect things to go well for those Black defendants. But as with the murder drama that I describe in my book, many things about this case defy expectations. A surprising group of people, Black and white, worked together to achieve some measure of justice. This book definitely served as a model for me as I was writing my own. And the author’s attention to detail, with every fact carefully documented, truly makes it a marvel of historical research. 

Frank Lloyd Wright is undoubtedly America’s most famous architect. Everyone knows his name, and those who study the field know how his distinctive styles changed the face of architecture in the early 1900s. But few realize the impact that a brutal mass murder had upon Wright’s life and work. It happened at his Taliesin estate in rural Wisconsin in 1914. One of Wright’s house servants, Julian Carlton, went on a rampage with an axe, hacking to death Wright’s lover Mamah Borthwick Cheney and her two children. Four others also were killed when Carlton set the house on fire. Of course the tragedy was personally devastating for Wright, and it also changed the creative course of his life. After Taliesin was destroyed, he moved away from the Prairie House style of organic architecture, for which he had originally become famous.

A story of a brutal crime, of a long hunt for justice, and of small-town corruption at its worst. In June 1970, Nancy Morgan was murdered in a remote mountain cove in Madison County, North Carolina. The case lay dormant until 1984, when one of Nancy’s friends was unexpectedly charged with the crime. But the prosecution’s case fell apart at trial, and the author lays out a persuasive theory that the county sheriff—long known for his family’s style of local machine politics—instigated the charges against an innocent man in order to boost his re-election bid, when he knew full well that the real murderer was the son of one of his political supporters. For anyone who has ever posed the question—how bad can politics get?—this story provides a very disturbing answer.

This book covers how junk science leads to wrongful convictions. In this instance, it is bite analysis. The two men at the center of this story are Steven Hayne, the cadaver King, and Michael West, the Country Dentist.

The author focuses on one case, but these two men are responsible for several questionable convictions based solely on their testimony. As bad as these two are, you will be equally outraged by the incompetent judges, jurors, prosecutors, and defense attorneys that populate the stories of wrongful convictions covered in this book.

I recently saw the critic Molly Young describe this book as the story of a woman who goes to prison essentially for being annoying.

That hooked me, so I went out and found a copy. I hadn’t read anything by Janet Malcolm before this, and I was sad it had taken me so long to get to her work. This one isn’t a novel, but Malcolm has such a knack for character that it often reads like one.

She also has so many great, cutting insights about the legal system, and a few lines that made me laugh out loud. I love a great short book, and this one fits the bill.

Many authors who write about international criminal justice forget that those who are the subject of criminal investigations have their own interests and goals in how they respond. The states in which these investigations take place try to use the courts and tribunals for their own purposes, like neutralizing opposition or presenting themselves as good international citizens.

In this book, Clark reports on his decade-long investigation into the effect of the ICC on politics in African states, especially the DRC and Uganda. I love how he draws on a variety of sources and hundreds of interviews to produce a detailed and nuanced story. 

I love this book because it reminds me how much of criminal justice history ultimately comes down to ordinary people refusing to give up.

Gideon was not powerful, wealthy, educated, or politically connected. Yet his handwritten petition transformed the constitutional right to counsel in America. As both a lawyer and teacher, I find this story endlessly inspiring because it shows how fragile and unfinished our legal protections really are.

I have recommended this book to students for years because it captures why the right to counsel matters in human terms rather than abstract doctrine.

One thing prisons purposely do not do is teach you anything about the history of prisons. If you want to do that, you’ll have to do it on your own—and Oshinsky is such a great start. His 1996 book details the roots of Parchman prison in Mississippi and draws a line from slavery to convict leasing to modern-day penal farms.

Forman’s book is a must-read to learn why the War on Crime was not merely the work of one party or one racial group in society. Indeed, a number of people of color, including black mayors and black chiefs of police, strongly supported tough-on-crime measures.

The book raises the question of what it will take to reverse the trends of mass incarceration, given these realities.