October 15, 2007
The Duke Non-Rape Case—Sources Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:00 AM EST In a post last June, Alexander Burns wrote, regarding the Duke case, “I . . . find it believable that the Duke faculty, as well as members of the national media, joined in a ‘rush to judgment that was racist at its heart.’ . . . I’m curious where I might look for evidence of such racism. I’ll admit that I try my hardest to block out the hysterical yammering of Nancy Grace and journalists like her, so I’m probably not as tuned in to this case as the average American. This being the case, what would I say if I wanted to convince somebody that the media and faculty would have reacted differently if the exotic dancer in the case had been white?” I would highly recommend Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, by Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson. It reads like a John Grisham novel (in fact it’s blurbed by Mr. Grisham) but is written by a nationally respected legal reporter and a history professor at Brooklyn College who blogged exhaustively on the case as it was unfolding. The book has been very well reviewed, even in The New York Times Book Review, although the Times, deservedly, comes in for brutal criticism in the book for its shamelessly agenda-driven coverage of the case. On Amazon, it’s been reviewed by 32 readers, 30 of them giving it five-star reviews. (There is one four-star and one, inevitably, one-star review.)
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