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Simon and Schuster
May 2011
On Sale: May 3, 2011
496 pages ISBN: 1416552731 EAN: 9781416552734 Hardcover
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True Crime
The man who revolutionized the way we think about
baseball now examines our cultural obsession with
murder—delivering a unique, engrossing, brilliant history of
tabloid crime in America. Celebrated writer
and contrarian Bill James has voraciously read true crime
throughout his life and has been interested in writing a
book on the topic for decades. Now, with Popular Crime,
James takes readers on an epic journey from Lizzie
Borden to the Lindbergh baby, from the Black Dahlia to O. J.
Simpson, explaining how crimes have been committed,
investigated, prosecuted and written about, and how that has
profoundly influenced our culture over the last few
centuries— even if we haven’t always taken notice.
Exploring such phenomena as serial murder, the
fluctuation of crime rates, the value of evidence,
radicalism and crime, prison reform and the hidden ways in
which crimes have shaped, or reflected, our society, James
chronicles murder and misdeeds from the 1600s to the present
day. James pays particular attention to crimes that were
sensations during their time but have faded into obscurity,
as well as still-famous cases, some that have never been
solved, including the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Boston
Strangler and JonBenet Ramsey. Satisfyingly sprawling and
tremendously entertaining, Popular Crime is a
professed amateur’s powerful examination of the incredible
impact crime stories have on our society, culture and history.
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