I'm part of a bookclub at school and we just finished reading, "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen. I learned a lot about the circus. It was a fascinating read with some over-the-top sex parts but it was well written.
We also read Jeff's favorite :P, "Angry Housewives eating Bon-Bons" which is a cute book it's just a really long read!
BUT my favorite book the past month was John Grisham's latest book, "The Innocent Man" which is a nonfiction book based on a trial in Ada, Oklahoma. It is really, REALLY good. I read the whole thing in about two days. I love reading a book that is well written and really educational. Definitely pick this one up if its, Wal-mart, target, or even at amazon!
What he says about the book: Dear Reader,
Writing nonfiction has seldom crossed my mind—I’ve had far too much fun with the novels—and I had no idea what I was getting into when I started writing The Innocent Man.
This story, and the research and writing of it, consumed eighteen months. It took me to Ada, Oklahoma many times, to the courthouse and jail and coffee shops around town, to both the old death row and the new one at McAlester, to Asher, where I sat in the bleachers for two hours and talked baseball with Murl Bowen, to the offices of the Innocence Project in New York, to a café in Seminole where I had lunch with Judge Frank Seay, to Yankee Stadium, to the prison in Lexington where I spent time with Tommy Ward, and to Norman, my base, where I hung out with Mark Barrett and talked about the story for hours.
With every visit and every conversation, the story took a different twist. I could’ve written five thousand pages.
The journey also exposed me to the world of wrongful convictions, something that I, even as a former lawyer, had never spent much time thinking about. This is not a problem peculiar to Oklahoma, far from it. Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in this country, and the reasons are all varied and all the same—bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad defense lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogant prosecutors.
In the cities, the workloads of criminologists are staggering and often give rise to less than professional procedures and conduct. And in the small towns the police are often untrained and unchecked. Murders and rapes are still shocking events and people want justice, and quickly. They, citizens and jurors, trust their authorities to behave properly. When they don’t, the result is Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz.
Ada is a nice town, and the obvious question is: When will the good guys clean house?
