true crime

Twists and Turns of a Bald-Faced Liar

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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou, Knopf, 2018.

Well! Recently on the Happier podcast Liz mentioned that she had just read a fascinating book and she was buttonholing everyone she knows and insisting that they read it too. It sounded so good that I figured maybe I should take a look, especially since Liz is in the midst of producing a new TV series and barely has time to breathe. If she read it, well, it must be worth a look, I thought. My new month’s Audible credit was in place, so I decided to go ahead and use that. Wow. I was absolutely entranced and stayed so to the very end. The audiobook is voiced by a great reader, by the way.

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What do you care what people think?

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Book cover for Blood Will OutBlood Will Out:  The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade by Walter Kirn.

One of these days I’m going to write about the book by Richard Feynmann that actually has the title of this post.  That’s a truly great book about a truly great genius, who absolutely and positively refused to be guided by other people’s opinions.

This book, though, is about someone, actually two someones, whose whole lives were bound up in caring about what other people thought of them.  While there is indeed a murder and a mystery in this book,

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A Fighter for Justice

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Cover for "Just Mercy"Just Mercy:  A story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson, Spiegel & Grau, 2014.

Gideon picked this week’s book.   We had both heard the author interviewed on NPR and thought he sounded fascinating, so I got his book.  When this guy had the time to write it  I do not know.  He got involved in death penalty cases while he was still in law school, and this passion took over his life.  You can listen to the NPR interview here and watch his TED talk here.

I found this to be a hard book to read because it’s so heartbreaking but also because there’s no resolution for most if not all of the crimes he discusses.  The spine of the book concerns the case of Walter McMillian, a young black man who was tried and sentenced to death for the murder of a young woman and who always insisted that he was innocent.

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