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An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution And Persecution Of Leo Frank (2010)

by Elaine Marie Alphin(Favorite Author)

3.83 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0822589443 (ISBN13: 9780822589440)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Carolrhoda Books

review 1: I’m not usually a fan of true crime books, but the story of a 1913 murder and execution really caught my interest. It also helps that it’s a YA book so I was counting on it being somewhat shorter and perhaps less graphic than some other true crime out there. I was rewarded by this gripping story of the murder of 13 year old Mary Phagan and the subsequent case against the Jewish superintendent of the factory where she worked in Atlanta. It’s a story of racism, classism and mob justice that was highly readable. Adding to the appeal, the book has primary source documents throughout the story. Images of the notes found at the scene of the crime are on the page facing the page where they are first mentioned. There are pictures, postcards and innumerable newspaper articles... more throughout the book. It was half reference book and half popular non-fiction and was really enjoyable.
review 2: The case of Leo Frank—the Cornell-educated, Jewish supervisor of the Atlanta Pencil Factory who was convicted for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan in 1913 and lynched for the same in 1915—has been with me much as of late. In the last three weeks, I have reviewed Steve Oney’s And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (Pantheon, 2003); attended another performance of Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown’s musical “Parade” (this time with my 13-year-old daughter); and shopped the Austin Jewish Book Fair where I bought a young adult book by Elaine Marie Alphin: An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank (CarolRhoda Books, 2010). Would that for every superb work of adult nonfiction (such as Mr. Oney’s), there were another equally compelling, young adult version (such as Ms. Alphin’s). Let’s face it: We can’t all invest the time to read the definitive work on every topic of interest. And the Dead Shall Rise is over 700 pages long. An Unspeakable Crime is only 152. If you want concise, yet substantial information on an important subject, look to the young adult section of your bookstore or library. You may even find, as I have, that reading the young adult version enhances your experience of the adult version. For instance, Alphin provides a timeline and a list of characters—something I had wished for while reading Oney. Most importantly, Alphin offers a trim storyline which is worth reading before the Oney book as a preview or after it as a review. Alphin successfully presents her young readers with the social context in which this drama unfolded, explaining that not only was Frank a Jew, but also a northerner and an industrialist who was perceived as imposing a new and unwelcome order on the traditionally agrarian south. Just when the teen reader would feel overwhelmed by the failure of Frank’s appeals, Alphin explains: “. . . each court’s decision had to be based on points of law, not common sense.” There were also political scores to be settled and elections to be won—complicated motives that challenge how a teen understands justice and society. Alphin does not shy away from grim details—the condition Mary’s strangled body was found in, the possibility that blood on her dress was the result of menstruation rather than rape, the knife-wielding inmate at the Georgia State Prison Farm who slashed Leo’s throat, or the grinding of Leo’s face in the dirt after he was cut down from the tree. There are lurid details that Alphin thankfully left out (my daughter does not need to read about Jim Conley’s anal intercourse with Annie Maude Carter). But there’s one detail I wish Alphin had kept in: the shit in the shaft. When detectives escorted Frank to the factory to identify the body, they rode the elevator to the basement where they were met by a horrible stench as the elevator car landed on fresh feces. Jim Conley had moved his bowels on the basement floor in the elevator shaft while the elevator car was parked above; ergo, he could not have carried Mary’s body with Frank on the elevator to the basement—as he testified in court—without disturbing the feces. Interestingly, the logistics of the elevator car, shaft, basement, and trap door finally made sense to me because of an illustration in Alphin’s book. Teenage workers in the pencil factory played a pivotal role in Frank’s trial, and Alphin uses their stories to pose important questions to her young readers: Why did so many people lie on the witness stand? Was it peer pressure or emotional mass hysteria? She concludes the book with the story of Alonzo Mann, Frank’s 14-year-old office boy, who, almost 70 years later in 1982, signed an affidavit stating that he saw Conley carrying Mary’s body, but failed to testify to this because he feared retaliation from Conley and because his parents told him not to get involved. In 2011, An Unspeakable Crime received both IPPY (Independent Publishers) and NCSS (National Council for the Social Sciences) Carter G. Woodson awards for young adult nonfiction. I look forward to giving my daughter this book for Hanukkah. less

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