America's Best-Selling Authors: Laura Caldwell and Peter Andreas PDF  | Print |  E-mail
Tuesday, 09 May 2017 00:00
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"America's Best Selling Authors Series"

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Laura
Caldwell
  Peter
Andreas
  Jack
Girardi

Guest:Laura Caldwell
Author of "Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted"
Website: Laura Caldwell Website

Laura Caldwell is the bestselling author of 14 novels as well as the acclaimed nonfiction work Long Way Home: A Young Man Lost in the System and the Two Women Who Found Him (Free Press, Simon & Schuster). Her short fiction has appeared in several award-winning anthologies. Caldwell formerly practiced as civil trial attorney and now is a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

In 2008, she founded Life After Innocence at Loyola, to aid persons wrongly convicted. Since its founding, Caldwell has served as LAI’s director, working with dozens of staff members and law students who advocate for innocent people adversely affected by the criminal justice system. They help these exonerees re-enter society and enable them to reclaim their rights as citizens through individualized legal and support services and wider-reaching public policy initiatives. LAI helps them find homes to live in, connects them with jobs, teaches them the basic necessities for functioning in present-day society and assists them in expunging their records and pursuing compensation from the state. LAI is now a model for similar projects around the world.

Caldwell is grateful to the exonerees for having the courage to tell their stories so unflinchingly, and to the writers, who gave of themselves to ensure the book is the best it can be. She also thanks Leslie S. Klinger for his tireless efforts in co-editing Anatomy of Innocence.

THE BOOK: "Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted"

Wrongful convictions, long regarded as statistical anomalies in an otherwise sound justice system, now appear with frightening regularity. But few people understand just how or why they happen and, more important, the immeasurable consequences that often haunt the lucky few who are acquitted, years after they are proven innocent.

Now, in this groundbreaking anthology, fourteen exonerated inmates narrate their stories to a roster of high-profile mystery and thriller writers―including Lee Child, Sara Paretsky, Laurie R. King, Jan Burke and S. J. Rozan―while another exoneree’s case is explored in a previously unpublished essay by legendary playwright Arthur Miller. An astonishing and unique collaboration, these testimonies bear witness to the incredible stories of innocent men and women who were convicted of serious crimes and cast into the maw of a vast and deeply flawed American criminal justice system before eventually, and miraculously, being exonerated.

Introduced by best-selling authors Scott Turow and Barry Scheck, these master storytellers capture the tragedy of wrongful convictions as never before and challenge readers to confront the limitations and harsh realities of the American criminal justice system. Lee Child tells of Kirk Bloodsworth, who obsessively read about the burgeoning field of DNA testing, cautiously hoping that it held the key to his acquittal―until he eventually became the first person to be exonerated from death row based on DNA evidence. Judge John Sheldon and author Gayle Lynds team up to share Audrey Edmunds’s experience raising her children long distance from her prison cell. And exoneree Gloria Killian recounts to S. J. Rozan her journey from that fateful "knock on the door" and the initial shock of accusation to the scars she carries today.

Together, the powerful stories collected within the Anatomy of Innocence detail every aspect of the experience of wrongful conviction, as well as the remarkable depths of endurance sustained by each exoneree who never lost hope.

Guest:Peter Andreas
Author of "Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted"
Website: Peter Andreas Website

Peter Andreas is the John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University, where he holds a joint appointment between the Department of Political Science and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Andreas has published ten books, including Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America. He has also written for a range of publications, including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Harpers, The Nation, The New Republic, Slate, and The Washington Post. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Cornell University, he lives with his family in Providence, Rhode Island. 

THE BOOK: "Rebel Mother: My Childhood Chasing"

Carol Andreas was a traditional 1950s house wife from a small Mennonite town in central Kansas who became a radical feminist and Marxist revolutionary. From the late sixties to the early eighties, she went through multiple husbands and countless lovers while living in three states and five countries. She took her youngest son, Peter, with her wherever she went, even kidnapping him and running off to South America after his straitlaced father won a long and bitter custody fight.

They were chasing the revolution together, though the more they chased it the more distant it became. They battled the bad “isms” (sexism, imperialism, capitalism, fascism, consumerism), and fought for the good “isms” (feminism, socialism, communism, egalitarianism). They were constantly running, moving, hiding. Between the ages of five and eleven, Peter attended more than a dozen schools and lived in more than a dozen homes, moving from the comfortably bland suburbs of Detroit to a hippie commune in Berkeley to a socialist collective farm in pre-military coup Chile to highland villages and coastal shantytowns in Peru. When they secretly returned to America they settled down clandestinely in Denver, where his mother changed her name to hide from his father.

This is an extraordinary account of a deep mother-son bond and the joy and toll of growing up with a radical mother in a radical age. Andreas is an insightful and candid narrator whose unforgettable memoir gives new meaning to the old saying, “the personal is political.”

Hosted by Steve Murphy
Steve Murphy
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Contact:

Guest:Laura Caldwell
Author of "Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted"
Website: Laura Caldwell Website

Guest:Peter Andreas
Author of "Rebel Mother: My Childhood Chasing"
Website: Peter Andreas Website

Jack Girardi
Co-Host
Website: www.girardikeese.com

Steve Murphy
Executive Producer and Host
Website: www.lbishow.com

Last Updated on Tuesday, 09 May 2017 22:30