A Softer Dave Cullen

A word to the wise - the new softcover edition of Dave Cullen's stupendously well-researched and emotionally searing account of the 1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold high school massacre, Columbine, (reviewed at this site) is now available. 

Tulia by Nate Blakeslee

This is one I just happened upon at the library - I didn't know anything at all about the events chronicled by journalist Nate Blakeslee from 1999 to 2003, so I took a chance, and I'm very glad I did.  Tulia is a small town in the Texas Panhandle, and in 1999, a joint County-State-Federal drug enforcement task force raided it and arrested more than 40 of its citizens on charges of cocaine sales.  The vast majority of those charged were black and impoverished, and the arrests netted fully one fifth of the town's total black residents.

Just another sad story about the intersection of race and poverty with drug use, one might think.  But this bust was unusual in several respects.  First, all of the arrests were for delivery of powder cocaine, instead of the much more common crack.  Second, all of the arrests depended on one sole piece of evidence:  the testimony of Tom Coleman, the Swisher County undercover officer who made, according to his own testimony, more than 100 buys from more than 40 different people over an 18-month period. 

Ellroy's World

Welcome to Ellroy's World.  It's just like the world you know, only different - all of the same events, but with different causes, rooted in the bad decisions of bad men wallowing in a morass of violence and corruption.  It's the alternate universe created by Neo-Noir madman James Ellroy, and it will twist your mind.

Ellroy's work is probably familiar to most through the movie adaptation of his L.A. Confidential, which simplified his novel considerably, while still managing to capture its essential spirit.  But that book was merely the third part of a quartet - The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L. A. Confidential, and White Jazz - all of which feature ambivalent anti-heroes trying to find some kind of salvation in a city so corrupt it makes Sodom look like Branson, Missouri.