satisfied
The first book I picked up is Until Proven Innocent by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor. It's basically all about the Duke Lacrosse case which I followed religiously for over a year. So far the book has received fantastic reviews from just about every source I've read. KC Johnson has been reporting on the case from the beginning at his blog Durham in Wonderland and I've read along all this time. It's an unbelievable example of railroading and racism and, in the end, good vs evil. If you had a story like this appear in some John Grisham novel, I'll bet most people would feel that it was simply unbelievable.
The only downside in this is that since I have been a daily reader of the blog and I've devoured all the news accounts and police documents and ever iota of information out there, a lot of the book will be a retread. That's a shame really, since the amount of research that KC put into his blog was simply amazing. To have had it condensed down to book size would have been a great way to summarize the whole case if I hadn't been getting all the info piecemeal. In the end, I figure the least I could was to buy the HC version and support him and the effort he put into providing info and research on the case.
The second book I snagged was AC Jacobs' The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. I had read Jacobs' last book The Know It All and had enjoyed it. In that book, he documented his efforts to read the Encyclopedia Britanica from A to Z, and in this one he tries to follow all of the rules in the bible both large and small. I found out about this latest book after hearing an interview with him on NPR and it sounds like it'll be a lot of fun. Apparently, he even got around to stoning an adulterer. I had so enjoyed the last book by him that I figured it was worth the extra few dollars to get this one early. Besides, it's quite likely that if I didn't order the book now it'd slip my mind and I'd never remember to get a copy.
I'll be sure to jot down a couple more book review entries when both books finally arrive and I work my way through them. I can't wait.
