A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY10 start with W start with W
Martin Preib is an officer in the Chicago Police Department—a beat cop whose first assignment as a rookie policeman was working on the wagon that picks up the dead. Inspired by Preib’s daily life on the job, The Wagon and Other Stories from the City chronicles the outer and inner lives of both a Chicago cop and the city itself.
The book follows Preib as he transports body bags, forges an unlikely connection with his female partner, trains a younger officer, and finds himself among people long forgotten—or rendered invisible—by the rest of society. Preib recounts how he navigates the tenuous labyrinths of race and class in the urban metropolis, such as a domestic disturbance call involving a gang member and his abused girlfriend or a run-in with a group of drunk yuppies. As he encounters the real and imagined geographies of Chicago, the city reveals itself to be not just a backdrop, but a central force in his narrative of life and death. Preib’s accounts, all told in his breathtaking prose, come alive in ways that readers will long remember.
A tragedy and a trial placed Ann-Janine Morey in an ideal position to write this wrenching exploration of the havoc wreaked on a family by Shaken Baby Syndrome. As an alternate juror in a 1995 murder trial in Murphysboro, Illinois, she observed a case that has become too common: that of an adult caregiver shaking to death a baby. A seasoned researcher and published scholar, in this book Morey witnesses the court proceedings firsthand, comes to know the families of the toddler intimately, and augments her observations and interviews through research into Shaken Baby Syndrome. The result is an agonizingly human tale supported by the evidence of science, sociology, and criminology.
Morey's What Happened to Christopher memorializes the short life of nineteen-month-old Christopher Attig (1992–1994). To reveal what Christopher meant to those closest to him, Morey conducts extensive interviews with the child's parents and grand-parents. She also interviews the officials involved in the case to set the scene from a legal and police angle. Gary Lynn Gould, who was convicted of and imprisoned for killing Christopher, did not answer Morey's requests for interviews.
Morey characterizes her investigation as a "story of quiet horror because it takes place in a way and a setting that could be any town and many families." Nonetheless, Morey's narrative skill transforms Christopher into much more than an ordinary child, senselessly slain. He is Christopher, irreplaceable and unique. And by the time she reconstructs Christopher's final days and the aftermath of his murder, Morey has depicted the principals in the case so deftly and imbued them with such humanity that we experience their torment and their hope.
Morey also provides a juror's insight into the trial. By showing what happened to Christopher Attig and by presenting the accumulated findings relative to Shaken Baby Syndrome, she seeks through education to help prevent future deaths like Christopher's.
Wheat Flour Messiah follows the career of Eric Jansson from his boyhood on a farm near Biskopskulla (Bishop’s Hill) in Sweden until his murder in Illinois by a crazed follower in 1850. He was an untutored but brilliant charismatic leader, who by sheer insolence and self-confidence defied both the Swedish state church and the secular government and persuaded some twelve hundred of his wheat flour customers to throw in their lot with him. The essence of his teaching was that anyone who so desired could receive the grace of God in such rich measure that he would instantly be freed of sin and live in angelic innocence from then on. This doctrine was an imperfectly understood version of Methodist perfectionism, held without Wesleyan safeguards, and it doomed his followers to civil war against the Lutheran church.
Jansson went north to Hälsingland in Sweden to sell wheat flour, but his deeper intention was to hold large religious services in the farmyards of followers. On three occasions he and his followers burned all the allegedly heretical books written by such men as Luther, Nohrborg, and Arndt, singing hymns while the flames "destroyed the works of the Devil." Jansson was jailed six times, and six times he was freed. After his last trial, as he was being escorted to jail, he escaped and later arranged passage to America. His disciples followed him in a series of Atlantic crossings during 1847–49 and settled the utopian colony of Bishop Hill, 150 miles west of Chicago. They built impressive buildings, plowed the virgin prairie, and began some successful industry making wagons and weaving rugs.
Two fateful events spelled the doom of this utopian dream. The first, the cholera epidemic of 1849,killed over two hundred of the colonists. The other was the arrival of John Root, who subsequently married Jansson’s cousin, Charlotte, and who, after a series of altercations with Jansson over Charlotte, shot him to death in Cambridge, Illinois. The colony did not long survive without its Prophet, and ten years later the utopian dream ended. Today Bishop Hill remains little changed from a century ago—a colorful memory of American beginnings, a vivid reminder of its fascinating past.
Dr. Elmen’s book tells for the first time the life story of a folk hero, Eric Jansson. The Bishop Hill Colony was clearly the lengthened shadow of this extraordinary man. Students of utopian colonies, teachers and students of American history and religious movements will find here a definitive account of this piece of the American past. Any reader interested in the American Dream will enjoy this account of a vanished people who thought they could find somewhere on earth a great, good place, and who had to learn after much suffering that one cannot express in waking reality the character of man in his dreams.
"The murder mystery that has confounded and fascinated people for over forty years has been given a whole new life. When Evil Came to Good Hart is a well-researched and well-written piece of nonfiction that holds the reader in its spell, just as it has the many writers, reporters, and law officers who have puzzled over it. My highest praise for Mardi Link's book is to say that it reads like a good novel, a real page-turner."
—Judith Guest, author of Ordinary People and The Tarnished Eye
In this page-turning true-life whodunit, author Mardi Link details all the evidence to date. She crafts her book around police and court documents and historical and present-day statements and interviews, in addition to exploring the impact of the case on the community of Good Hart and the stigma that surrounds the popular summer getaway. Adding to both the sense of tragic history and the suspense, Link laces her tale with fascinating bits of local and Indian lore, while dozens of colorful characters enter and leave the story, spicing the narrative.
During the years of investigation of the murders, officials considered hundreds of tips and leads as well as dozens of sources, among them former secretaries who worked for murder victim Dick Robison; Robison's business associates; John Norman Collins, perpetrator of the "Co-Ed Murders" that took place in Washtenaw County between 1967 and 1969; and an inmate in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, who said he knew who killed the Robison family.
Despite the exhaustive investigative efforts of numerous individuals, decades later the case lies tantalizingly out of reach. It is still an unsolved cold case, yielding, in Link's words, forty years worth of "dead-end leads, anonymous tips, a few hard facts, and countless cockamamie theories."
In this page-turning true-life whodunit, author Mardi Link looks into the cold-case files of the murders of a wealthy Detroit-area family in their northern Michigan cabin in 1968, detailing and reviewing all the evidence to date. She crafts her book around police and court documents and historical and present-day statements and interviews, in addition to exploring the impact of the case on the community of Good Hart and the stigma that surrounds the popular summer getaway. Adding to both the sense of tragic history and the suspense, Link laces her tale with fascinating bits of local and Indian lore, while dozens of colorful characters enter and leave the story, spicing the narrative.
During the years of investigation of the murders, officials considered hundreds of tips and leads as well as dozens of sources, among them former secretaries who worked for murder victim Dick Robison; Robison's business associates; John Norman Collins, perpetrator of the "Co-Ed Murders" that took place in Washtenaw County between 1967 and 1969; and an inmate in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, who said he knew who killed the Robison family. Despite the exhaustive investigative efforts of numerous individuals, decades later the case lies tantalizingly out of reach as an unsolved cold case.
This edition, published at the 50th anniversary of the murder, includes a new Afterword by Mardi Link. In it, Link discusses information that’s come to light since the book’s original publication and reflects on how the Robison murders might have been handled differently today.
A provocative telling of "The Phenix City Story."
On June 18, 1954, former state senator Albert Patterson, the Democratic Party's nominee for state attorney general, was shot to death as he left his law office in Phenix City, Alabama, infamous for its prostitution, gambling, bootlegging, and political corruption. Patterson had made cleanup of Phenix City his primary campaign promise. With millions of dollars in illegal income and hundreds of political and professional careers at stake, the question surrounding Patterson's murder was not why the trigger was pulled, but who pulled it.
When Good Men Do Nothing is the definitive study of the Albert Patterson murder case. Alan Grady has mined the state's original murder case files; the papers of John Patterson, Albert's son; records from the Office of Alabama Attorney General (who directed the murder investigation); the case files of the Alabama Department of Toxicology and Criminal Investigation; National Guard reports; and more than 30 interviews with eyewitnesses and interested parties.
Grady takes a complex story of multiple dimensions—a large cast of judicial, criminal, and political players; a web of alliances and allegiances; and a knotted sequence of investigative revelations and dead ends—and transforms it into a readable, incisive analysis of the powers and loyalties that governed, and corrupted to the core, the body politic of the state. Readers will be enthralled and educated by this authoritative account of the most compelling crime drama in Alabama during the 20th century.
Rob Warden, one of the nation's most eloquent and effective advocates for the wrongly convicted, reconsiders the facts of the Boorn case for what they can tell us about the systemic flaws that produced this first known miscarriage of justice-flaws that continue to riddle our system of justice today. A tale of false confessions and jailhouse snitches, of evidence overlooked, and justice more blinkered than blind, the Boorns' story reminds us of the perennial nature of the errors at the heart of American jurisprudence-and of the need to question and correct a system that regularly condemns the innocent.
In January 1992, poet Neal Bowers received a phone call that changed his life. He learned his poems had been stolen and published under another name. Bowers hired a copyright lawyer and a private detective, and they began the agonizing hunt to track down the person who stole his creative work.
Bowers was dealing with more than the theft of words. He uncovered the plagiarist’s unsavory past when he found convicted child molester David Jones, who published the poems using the name David Sumner.
Determined to hold the plagiarist accountable, Bowers is drawn into a bizarre game of catch-me-if-you-can. His odyssey introduces him to the legal system and a sympathetic female detective, reveals the reactions of fellow poets, and provokes a flood of nationwide publicity and a deluge of letters from strangers interested in the case. Letters from Bowers’s attorney to Jones and phone conversations between the two produce unsatisfactory results. In the end, the plagiarist is not punished, and Bowers deals with the loss of friends, derision from his colleagues, and trouble in his marriage.
Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist, first published in 1997, is as much a commentary on our cultural view of plagiarism as it is a real-life detective story. Bowers’s wry and disturbing account of being the victim of a serial plagiarist offers unexpected twists and startling revelations. This updated edition presents a final consideration of the bizarre case and remains the only book to offer a personal account of the effects of plagiarism.
Ten years after the original publication, Neal Bowers finds his life as a writer altered in ways he could never have foreseen. His responses to the series of events show his vulnerability as an artist and his adjustment to being a victim. In a new chapter, Bowers describes his renewed quest in 2006 for a resolution and explains why he chose to give up writing poetry.
This beautifully written case study about the discovery and attempted resolution of an intellectual crime will appeal to academicians and general readers alike who care about language, the state of poetry, and intellectual property in contemporary America.
Pieter Spierenburg narrates two sensational murder cases among intimates in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. The cases recounted here both resulted from fatal attraction. They represented the darker side of the eighteenth-century revolution in love. This period witnessed great cultural changes affecting personal relationships and emotions. The new ideal of love demanded that couples spend much of their time together and explore each other’s feelings. But this new ideal was meant for married and engaged couples only; for others it meant disaster. Love gone wrong was the theme of the sentimental novels of the age, but it also happened to real people, with fatal consequences.
Written in Blood traces the lives and ultimate fate of Nathaniel Donker, who, together with the help of his mistress, brutally murders and dismembers the wife. The second tale focuses on J. B. F. van Gogh, who falls in love with a prostitute; she later rejects him and, when a letter written with his own blood fails to change her mind, he stabs her to death in a fit of passionate rage.
In Written in Blood, the reader gets two stories for the price of one. And, whereas earlier microhistories have been situated in a village or a small town, the scene here is Amsterdam and its canals. Spierenburg reveals in detail what concepts like honor and gender roles came down to in individual lives. He also shows that these murders produced a strange mixture of modern romantic feelings and traditional notions of honor and shame.
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