Almost Home: My Life Story Vol 1 Review

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(More customer reviews)Amazingly intimate and personal reflections of Damien Echols, an innocent man currently enduring a deathrow prison sentence (Jason Baldwin and Jessie Miskelley were also convicted and got life sentences). While the West Memphis case has been under a magnifying glass -- two HBO documentaries, two books written about the case and the clearinghouse for all legal information, the wm3.org website -- not much is known about who he was before the murders that resulted in his unjust conviction. And he does not disappoint. The bulk of the book concerns his growing up poor mostly in the repressed south. Fascinating and a must read for anyone who has taken an interest in the West Memphis Three case.

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Almost Home is a message to you from a faraway place. It is a message from a 12-foot by 9-foot cell in a cinderblock building surrounded by coils of razor wire in the middle of a dirt field in Arkansas. It was written by a young man named Damien Echols and it chronicles his life and his experiences in a way that clearly illuminates him, not as a monster, but as a human being. For over 10 years Damien has been an inmate on death row for a crime he did not commit. He, along with Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley have become known as The West Memphis Three, and though the story of their arrest and conviction is widely known, most people don't know the real people behind the sound bites and the TV news segment clips. Damien has spent much of his time behind bars diligently maintaining his integrity and his sanity by writing.
Almost Home is the product of that self-discipline, and in it you will meet someone who has survived an ordeal many of us would find impossible to live through. There are a few who still believe that Damien is a devil-worshipping child killer, but as time passes and more facts rise to the surface, it becomes even more clear that he is the victim of a peculiar species of hysteria. Read this book and know the truth about him. It is an urgent message from death row; the whole story of who Damien Echols really is.

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Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three Review

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(More customer reviews)I'm fascinated by the West Memphis Three case, but the advocacy nature of so much of the available information (the documentaries, the wm3.org website) has always left me with the feeling I'm not getting the whole story. The main figures in the West Memphis and Arkansas justice system have long said that the movies and website skirt the true facts, and if those facts were known people would understand that the guilty parties are in prison. Leveritt wisely took this assertion as the premise of her book--she decided to put it to the test. She has done a brilliant, dispassionate job of it. My understanding of this case had deepened tenfold by the time I finished reading the book (as well as its exhaustive end notes). Every opportunity is given to advocates of the boys' guilt to bring to light those missing "true facts." It is utterly horrifying to see how this process actually casts more doubt on the case that the prosecutors and police created. The horror is compounded by the obvious fact that Leveritt is not presenting a slanted version of the story. She goes above and beyond to find those crucial "true facts" that will establish guilt. But it seems they don't exist.
The documentaries, website materials and other information about this case (I've been semi-obsessed with it since 1996) have always left vague, nagging doubts in my mind. This book erased them.

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Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City Review

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(More customer reviews)I liked this book because it made me examine some pre-concieved notions I had(have.) It took me several chapters to figure out the author's race and religion and my perceptions morphed during the exercise.
I used to live in New Orleans and my brother still does. He was there through Katrina and I was there less than 2 weeks after.
The book presents some of the most grievous episodes of post-Katrina NOLA--evacuees turned back on the Crescent City connection, the handling of state prisoners, the case of Abdulrahman Zeitoun and tries to extrapolate from them a theory of systematic oppression. I didn't quite buy it, but the author shines a light on some obvious problems in southern Louisiana.
As a lawyer who represents death penalty prisoners he has a clear bias against law enforcement and "the system." Every instance of authority paints the law enforcement officers in the worst possible light. I don't doubt that there are bad cops in New Orleans, but I worked with many noble selfless officers when I worked in the Emergnecy Rooms in Baton Rouge, Metairie and Bay St Louis, MS. Still, there's no defense for women pushing strollers to be forced back to the Superdome at shotgun point.
The book reads like a confession from the author who is trying to exorcise his survivor's guilt rather than an objective reflection on what happened. It is an interesting an compelling read, but it's only a few moments of one side of a very long story.


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Torture at the Back Forty: The Gang Rape and Slaying of Margaret Anderson Review

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(More customer reviews)Well I am shocked by all those raving reviews. I am so disappointed with this book just because of them. I expected a great book but it wasn't great at all. The author just touched a little bit on the crime (they did not really know what really happened) People say they got to know the victim Margaret? well not at all. Maybe 1 chapter was about her but then you still do not really get to know her.
Most chapters are (it is a very short book only 165 pages) are that the cops are wondering where they were hiding, and you get to hear many different names which makes it confusing and to be honest not very interesting, plus most people were lying to the cops. Then they find them and you get the trial. Well most boring trial ever. I plead the 5th is all they say.
I was glad I finished it and am a bit pissed of that I spend my money on this based on the amazon reviewers. Are these all reviewers who get the book for free before the book is published? I hardly write reviews because my English is not good enough to really say adequate what I mean but in this case I had to.

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The true story of the pool table rape and murder of Margaret Anderson. Left for dead, practically beheaded in a manure pile, Margaret fights for life. But in the end, the single mother leaves behind a son. Author Dauplaise practically makes Margaret blow a breath at readers as he recreates the night she was killed. He then takes readers to the place she was trying to escape back to, her home state of Montana and finally, on the investigative hunt of a lifetime as this America's Most Wanted drama ends with the capture of her killer five years later.

Readers will remember the case. Dauplaise infiltrates the motorcycle gang (club) culture of the 1980s to expose what happened to Anderson and why she was just six months away from disappearing back to Montana. True-crime enthusiasts will revel in the detail and the hunt.

Vivid. Enthralling. Horrific.

"Mike Dauplaise has a microscopic ability to see and know the truth as it exists, not as it seems. He presents here a murder story that needs to be told."

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