Frank, Mary, and Nanking
The last two books I've read have been a little on the morbid side. That's one reason that I'm reading "Moneyball" now...
"And The Dead Shall Rise" is about the murder of a 13 year old girl in Atlanta, Georgia in the early 1900s and the subsequent lynching of Leo Frank who was found guilty of the crime. I found the details of the murder and trial (which is quite convoluted) sometimes to be quite tedious and dull to read. The most interesting part of the book is when it discusses the social environment under which the trial and subsequent lynching was conducted. There is a lot of background information given to each major player, and it's quite interesting to see how southern whites, urban blacks, and transplanted Jews handled living in that type of extremely prejudice and discriminatory post-Civil War, pre-Civil Rights American South. The fact that a lynching of that scale could happen and go unpunished is still quite shocking. The book is rather long (600+ pages), but the glimpse of the prevailing social attitudes in Georgia just one hundred years ago is a worthy payoff if you find this type of thing interesting.
"The Devil of Nanking" is one of those disturbing books that you don't want to really keep reading but can't put down. Even though it's a work of fiction, in that sense it is quite like "The Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang, which I recommend, if for nothing more than the education you get, but can only bring myself to read once. "The Devil of Nanking" is also quite morbid. It's set in Japan, but I can't say that you really notice that too much, even though the author does spend some time describing the Japanese characters and Tokyo environment. It's just that the two main characters are British and Chinese, in addition to the fact that half the book is a diary written by the Chinese character, so the present day setting is somewhat in the background. The cover is quite creepy and appears on the back too, so you can't even put it face down! : )
"And The Dead Shall Rise" is about the murder of a 13 year old girl in Atlanta, Georgia in the early 1900s and the subsequent lynching of Leo Frank who was found guilty of the crime. I found the details of the murder and trial (which is quite convoluted) sometimes to be quite tedious and dull to read. The most interesting part of the book is when it discusses the social environment under which the trial and subsequent lynching was conducted. There is a lot of background information given to each major player, and it's quite interesting to see how southern whites, urban blacks, and transplanted Jews handled living in that type of extremely prejudice and discriminatory post-Civil War, pre-Civil Rights American South. The fact that a lynching of that scale could happen and go unpunished is still quite shocking. The book is rather long (600+ pages), but the glimpse of the prevailing social attitudes in Georgia just one hundred years ago is a worthy payoff if you find this type of thing interesting.
"The Devil of Nanking" is one of those disturbing books that you don't want to really keep reading but can't put down. Even though it's a work of fiction, in that sense it is quite like "The Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang, which I recommend, if for nothing more than the education you get, but can only bring myself to read once. "The Devil of Nanking" is also quite morbid. It's set in Japan, but I can't say that you really notice that too much, even though the author does spend some time describing the Japanese characters and Tokyo environment. It's just that the two main characters are British and Chinese, in addition to the fact that half the book is a diary written by the Chinese character, so the present day setting is somewhat in the background. The cover is quite creepy and appears on the back too, so you can't even put it face down! : )
posted by Mark Lee at 11:10 PM
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