The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town

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		The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town
		The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town

基本信息·出版社：Doubleday Books
·页码：368 页
·出版日期：2006年10月
·ISBN：0385517238
·条形码：9780385517232
·版本：2006-10-10
·装帧：精装
·开本：20开 Pages Per Sheet
·外文书名：无辜者: 谋杀与不公的小镇

内容简介 Book Description
John Grisham's first work of nonfiction, an exploration of small town justice gone terribly awry, is his most extraordinary legal thriller yet.

In the major league draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the State of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland As, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory.

Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits — drinking, drugs, and women. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept twenty hours a day on her sofa.

In 1982, a 21-year-old cocktail waitress in Ada named Debra Sue Carter was raped and murdered, and for five years the police could not solve the crime. For reasons that were never clear, they suspected Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with capital murder.

With no physical evidence, the prosecution's case was built on junk science and the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts. Dennis Fritz was found guilty and given a life sentence. Ron Williamson was sent to death row.

If you believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this book will shock you. If you believe in the death penalty, this book will disturb you. If you believe the criminal justice system is fair, this book will infuriate you.

Amazon.com
John Grisham tackles nonfiction for the first time with The Innocent Man, a true tale about murder and injustice in a small town (that reads like one of his own bestselling novels). The Innocent Man chronicles the story of Ron Williamson, how he was arrested and charged with a crime he did not commit, how his case was (mis)handled and how an innocent man was sent to death row. Grisham's first work of nonfiction is shocking, disturbing, and enthralling--a must read for fiction and nonfiction fans. We had the opportunity to talk with John Grisham about the case and the book, read his responses below.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Daphne Durham

From Publishers Weekly
Grisham's first work of nonfiction focuses on the tragedy of Ron Williamson, a baseball hero from a small town in Oklahoma who winds up a dissolute, mentally unstable Major League washout railroaded onto death row for a hometown rape and murder he did not commit. Judging by this author-approved abridgment, Grisham has chosen to present Williamson's painful story (and that of his equally innocent "co-conspirator," Dennis Fritz) as straightforward journalism, eschewing the more familiar "nonfiction novel" approach with its reconstructed dialogues and other adjustments for dramatic purpose. This has resulted in a book that, while it includes such intriguing elements as murder, rape, detection and judicial injustice, consists primarily of objective reportage, albeit shaded by the now-proven fact of Williamson's innocence. The absence of dialogue or character point of view could make for a rather bland audio. Boutsikaris avoids that by reverting to what might be called old-fashioned round-the-campfire storytelling, treating the lengthy exposition to vocal interpretations, subtle and substantial. He narrates the events leading up to the 1982 rape and murder of a young cocktail waitress with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, moving on to astonishment at the prosecution's use of deceit and false testimony to convict Williamson and Fritz and, eventually, elation at the exoneration of the two innocent men. Throughout, he maintains an appealing conversational tone, an effect made all the more remarkable by the book's nearly total absence of conversation.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Many of the literary skills that have established John Grisham at the forefront of mainstream legal thrillers (The Firm, The Pelican Brief) find their way into his first nonfiction brief: a razor-sharp sense of right and wrong; an eye for the unjustly accused; and a finely tuned legal mind. The majority of reviewers find Grisham making the transition to "real" life with ease: he turns out a compelling version of this confounding miscarriage of justice. Other critics find that Grisham's narrow view of the case undercuts its complexity and the philosophical issue at hand. In the end, reviewers' politics color their assessments. To most, it seems all to the good that über?best seller Grisham is putting his weight behind this thinly veiled treatise against abuses of the death penalty.

From AudioFile
John Grisham steps back from his tried-and-true courtroom dramas with this look at a real-life murder. Actor Craig Wasson narrates the story of ill-fated loser Ron Williamson, the man that a pair of small-town police detectives are convinced raped and murdered a young woman in 1982. Wasson is straightforward in his reading, seldom letting out the actor within. And like a newspaper reporter, Grisham uses a bare-bones factual approach that lacks the twists and turns of his novels. The listener will be outraged by the frailties of the criminal justice system portrayed, which is not as malleable as its fictitious counterparts, and more prone to error. Reality ain't pretty. M.S.

Book Dimension :
length: (cm)24 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)16.5
作者简介 John Grisham is the author of Skipping Christmas, The Summons, A Painted House, The Brethren, The Testament, The Street Lawyer, The Partner, The Runaway Jury, The Rainmaker, The Chamber, The Client, The Pelican Brief, The Firm, and A Time to Kill. He lives with his family in Mississippi and Virginia.

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