Framed: astonishing true stories of wrongful convictions by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey
John Grisham and Jim McCloskey (founder of Centurion Ministries) cowrote this book that shares 10 stories of innocent people wrongfully convicted (and one executed). The ones that McCloskey writes are cases that he actually helped with through his work with Centurion Ministries. I was impressed with McCloskey's writing - it has to be intimidating to write half of the stories in a book when the other half are written by John Grisham. All the stories are compelling and as the subtitle says, astonishing. I think the American public understands that there are innocent people in prison (or executed) but I don't know that the true numbers are actually known and if it were known it would be terrifying. This book is terrifying. Even though I read and watch a lot of true crime stuff that is in this vein, it was hard to read story after story of people spending DECADES in prison for crimes that not only they did not commit, but were basically framed by police/prosecution. I think this is an important read, but it is a hard read.
Some quotes I liked:
"Clarence [Brandley] was never compensated for his wrongful imprisonment on death row. He initiated lawsuits against the authorities responsible for his false conviction, but a judge dismissed them, saying those agencies had sovereign immunity. In 2011 he was denied compensation under the Texas compensation statute for false convictions. The fund claimed that his application was made too late. To add insult to injury, Texas ordered him to pay $25,000 for child support payments in arrears during his nine and a half years of false imprisonment. His weekly wages were garnished for many years." (p. 63)
"In a 2001 study, twenty-five well-known bite mark experts were given four identical sets of bite marks and asked to compare them with seven sets of dental molds. The error rate was an astonishing 63.5 percent. Only one-third accurately 'matched' the marks with the teeth. Almost all of them continued consulting and testifying in bite mark cases as if the study meant nothing...In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) declared that bite mark analysis as a forensic specialty was not based on science...In 2016, the Texas Forensic Science Commission declared bite mark analysis so unfounded that it should no longer be used in criminal trials. A moratorium was also recommended by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. But, science be damned. Bite mark analysis is still allowed in most jurisdictions; sought by prosecutors, presented by experts, approved by judges, believed by jurors, and rubber-stamped by appellate courts." (p. 86-87)
"Among innocence advocates and lawyers, it is often said that it is much easier to convict an innocent person that to get one out of prison." (p. 148)
The Wisdom of Sheep: observations from a family farm by Rosamund Young
The Wisdom of Sheep is a collection of farm observations from Rosamund Young. Rosamund and her brother Richard grew up on a family farm that they then took over from their parents. Rosamund always wanted to keep sheep, but I guess they are more labor intensive than cattle and so she had to wait until their Mom passed away as she was her mother's main caregiver. The entries range from a few sentences to a few pages. Some are directly about the workings of the farm and some are more musings on nature and animals. The whole tone is very gentle and meandering. This was exactly what I needed after finishing Framed by John Grisham about innocent people spending decades in prison after being framed by crooked cops/prosecutors. My only complaint is that the timeline of the entries is all over the place, so sometimes it's a little hard to follow. I wish there had been a little more information about how/why she and Richard continued the farm - did neither of them want to get married or have their own family? In her bio it says she runs the farm now with her partner Gareth. Gareth is introduced in the book but I would have liked more backstory on how they went from being roommate/landlord to romantic partners while still living in the house with her brother. I'd also like to know a little more about the farm - since they name all the animals they obviously aren't raising meat, so is it dairy and wool? I feel like there are a lot of unanswered questions. There are some nice black & white drawings throughout the book but I would have liked a few pages of photographs of their farm and some of the animals mentioned. Overall, a very gentle, pleasant reading experience about living on a cattle and sheep farm in the UK.
Seeking Shelter: a working mother, her children, and a story of homelessness in America by Jeff Hobbs
This is a unique look at homelessness through the story of two women, fifteen years apart, who are both helped by a unique organization called Door of Hope in Los Angeles, CA. Evelyn's family is the primary focus of the book and shows just how quickly a few bad decisions can lead to homelessness. Evelyn and her husband Manny decide to move from Lancaster, CA to Los Angeles to be in a better school system for their kids. Evelyn has 5 children, 3 with Manny and 2 with a prior boyfriend who is prison for gang-related crimes. After they move to LA, Manny quickly gets frustrated with their cramped situation living in an extended stay motel with 7 people and starts drinking more. Coming home drunk one night he punches Evelyn's oldest child, then attacks her when she gets home from work. She packs up the kids and leaves, launching them into homelessness. Shortly afterward, she finds out she is pregnant again. The whole year and a half that Evelyn and her kids are homeless, they never miss school and she is working, volunteering at the kids school, and still trying to find permanent housing. Through a social worker she gets referred to Door of Hope, a shelter that is an actual home where she receives therapy, job training, and free childcare. She has a kitchen to cook for her family and a back yard for them to play in with other kids at the shelter. After "graduating" from Door of Hope, Evelyn is matched up with Wendi, a prior "graduate" from Door of Hope who know works for the organization as a mentor to women who leave the program. Things aren't perfect for Evelyn once she leaves the shelter and is in her own place, but this help puts her family on a new path.
One of the most unique aspects of this book is that the author appears to have no agenda - no commentary on what can "fix" homelessness, no opinions on what Evelyn or Wendi did right or wrong, no political suggestions. He wanted to highlight the stories of two women who ended up homeless who weren't addicts or mentally ill to show that depending on your circumstances this can happen to anyone. Door of Hope is a unique organization that appears to be very successful in helping families go from homeless to housed, but it's help is just a drop in the bucket of the need out there. What was highlighted for me in the book is that for women being involved with the wrong man can destroy your life. The women are almost always the ones who end up with the kids and for both of these women if they had either had fewer children or the same number of children with the right man, they would have never become homeless. Definitely a very interesting and well-written book highlighting an the overwhelming problem of homelessness/affordable housing in the US.
Bringing Up Beaver: two orphaned beaver kits, their humans, and our journey back to the wild by John Aberth
John Aberth is a licensed wildlife rehabilitator in Vermont. In May of 2020 he got his first beaver call. Beavers are different than many other wildlife rehab because if they are young kits they need to stay with the rehabber for 2 years. They also require socialization so John and his wife would need to interact with the beaver kit like they were his family. "...Nine out of ten beaver kits in rehab die, often due to 'rehabber error' (p. 8-9) and a lack of bonding would make the kit depressed and lonely. John and his wife create environments for the beaver kit (whom they name BK) both inside and outside. During their two years with BK they learn a lot about rehabbing beavers, they help him find a mate (another orphaned, rescued kit), and find a new pond for him and his mate to be released. The book includes a selection of photos which is great because you get to actually see BK and some of the other animals Aberth rehabbed during the BK time period.
I LOVE beavers so I was really looking forward to reading this one. It also has a great cover that really draws you in to the story. But I didn't love this one. Maybe it was a little too repetitive - a LOT of poo talk and descriptions, a lot of descriptions of refilling water tanks, washing bedding, etc. It is an interesting story and I admire Aberth and his wife for spending so much time (and it is a LOT of time) doing this to help wildlife. Aberth and his wife don't have children and it was a little off-putting to me how much he referred to themselves as beaver-parents. Two years is a long time and of course you would bond with BK, but that aspect of the story was odd/off-putting to me. I did really like the postscript about "the tragedy of trapping" that highlights how harmful animal trapping can be and how untold numbers of beaver kits die when their parents are trapped. I think hunting for meat/food is fine but trapping seems to only be for fur or "nuisance" and there are other ways to handle those issues. Plus there is just a lot more suffering and cruelty in trapping. Overall, this is an interesting book but I didn't love it as much as other animal memoirs I've read. I would highly recommend Eager: the surprising, secret life of beavers and why they matter by Ben Goldfarb and Aberth quotes him in the postscript as well.
The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson (Books & Banter book club)
In the summer of 1919 Constance Haverhill is at Hazelbourne-on-Sea helping an elderly family friend, Mrs. Fog, recuperate from influenza. Constance had been running the accounting for this same family's estate during the war, but has now been released from that role for men coming back from the war. Constance's parents are no longer alive and her brother and his wife have taken over the family farm, so she feels like she needs to find her own way now. At the Hazelbourne seaside hotel she meets Poppy. Poppy is from a well-to-do family and is trying to help keep women working even after men come home from war with her motorcycle taxi service. Her brother, Harris, was wounded in battle and is struggling to reacclimate at home. Poppy sweeps Constance into her circle of friends and women motorcycle riders. Constance is having an amazing summer, but knows that she is not in the same class as Poppy and her friends and needs to find work that can support her soon. The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club uses the aftermath of World War I to explore issues of class, sex, race, ability, and money.
I found this book hard to get into. There are a LOT of characters and storylines going on and it can be hard to keep up with all of it. I did like Constance and I wanted to see what would happen to her. A lot of the other characters were pretty awful - spoiled, elitist, selfish, etc. The story overall was pretty slow, then all of a sudden the end sped up and SO MUCH was going on in the last few chapters. A lot of the storylines were either quickly wrapped up or dropped. I was happy with the ending for Constance but I wish that there hadn't been so many other storylines to wrap up. I think several characters/storylines could have been left out altogether. It was OK but I wouldn't recommend it and I wouldn't have read it if not for my book club.
The Wager: a tale of shipwreck, mutiny, and murder by David Grann (Evening Edition, re-read)
Two years after leaving England with a fleet of five warships survivors from The Wager wash up in Brazil telling a wild story of shipwreck, murder, and survival. These men are hailed as heroes who survived shipwreck, starvation, and a myriad of illnesses and trials. But a few months later another small ship lands in Chile and says the first group are actually mutineers who abandoned their captain and ship. The Navy calls a court martial and all surviving sailors from The Wager are called to testify. The press and public are fascinated with this dark tale of shipwreck and mutiny - but which group will prevail in the court martial? Who is actually telling the truth?
David Grann does an AMAZING job of telling this wild story that highlights the adage, the truth is stranger than fiction. And actually several maritime authors use the story of The Wager as inspiration for fictional books in later years. Grann gives the back stories of several of the key players in this real life drama, tells the story of The Wager's doomed voyage and shipwreck, and how the sailors who survived lived to tell their tales. It's amazing that anyone survived to today reading about how AWFUL life on the sea was for the sailors - and that was before any fighting/war even happened. Life on a ship it was almost like a prison with the chance of drowning added in and Grann explains how press gangs went around basically abducting men into service because it was such a hard life and high mortality that few would volunteer. What's amazing to me is several of the survivors went on to continue in Naval careers after their ordeal! The shipwrecked sailors ordeals were horrific and as one reviewer aptly put it - this was like Lord of the Flies non-fiction edition. I can't reiterate enough how well Grann lays out this story and the amount of research he did to get all the facts together and then convey it to the reader. He also includes several color photographs of paintings that depict some of the sailors and ships involved in this story, as well as some photographs of the island they were shipwrecked on in Patagonia. Once again, he's taken a true story that could have been lost to history and turned it into a page-turner book that you can't put down until you know what happens in the end.
Some quotes I liked:
"She was christened in honor of Sir Charles Wager, the seventy-four-year-old First Lord of the Admiralty. The ship's name seemed fitting: weren't they all gambling with their lives?" (p. 18-19)
"Byron confronted an inescapable truth of the wooden world: each man's life depended on the performance of others. They were akin to the cells in a human body; a single malignant one could destroy them all." (p. 38-39)
"Logbooks were supposed to be preserved from a wreck so that the Admiralty could later determine the potential culpability of not only the captain but also the lieutenant, the master, and other officers. Bulkeley was shocked to discover that many of the Wager's records had disappeared or were shredded, and not by mere accident. 'We have good reason to apprehend there was a person employed to destroy them,' he recalled. Somebody, whether a navigator or perhaps even a more senior officer, wanted to shield his actions from scrutiny." (p. 102)
Learned a new word - "internecine" which means "destructive to both sides in a conflict." and definitely summed up the shipwreck survivors of The Wager. p. 160
"Eighteenth-century British naval law has a reputation for being draconian, but it was often more flexible and forgiving in reality. Under the Articles of War, many transgressions, including falling asleep on watch, were punishable by death, yet there was usually an important caveat: a court could hand down a lesser sentence if it saw fit. And although overthrowing a captain was a grave crime, 'mutinous' behavior often applied to minor insubordinations not deemed worthy of severe punishment. Nevertheless, the case against all of the men of the Wager seemed overwhelming. They were not accused of negligible misconduct but, rather, of a complete breakdown of naval order, from the highest levels of command to the rank and file. And though they had each tried to shape their stories in ways that justified their actions, the legal system was designed to strip these narratives down to the bard, hard, unemotive facts." (p. 233)
"Strikingly, there was one surviving castaway who never had a chance to record his testimony in any form. Not in a book or in a deposition. Not even in a letter. And that was John Duck, the free Black seaman who had gone ashore with Morris's abandoned party. Duck had withstood the years of deprivation and starvation, and he had managed with Morris and two others to trek to the outskirts of Buenos Aires. But there his fortitude was of no avail, and he suffered what every free Black seaman dreaded: he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Morris didn't know where his friend had been taken, whether to the mines or to the fields - Duck's fate was unknown, as is the case for so many people whose stories can never be told." (p. 248)
"John Byron, who married and had six children, stayed in the Navy, serving for more than two decades and ascending the ranks all the way to vice-admiral...in the cloistered wooden world he seemed to find what he had longed for - a sense of fellowship. And he was widely praised for what one officer called his tenderness and his care toward his men." (p. 254)
Update from re-reading for book club 8/2025:
This is still an amazing read and I flew through it again because even though I knew what was going to happen you still get caught up in the story. Reading about earlier times when there were no antibiotics, no understanding of scurvy, life was just brutal. And the life of a seaman was beyond brutal. It's still amazing any of these men survived what they did to tell their stories. I'll be curious what my book club members will think because this is not our normal book club reading.
