This week has gone a little off the rails. We are expecting a contractor at the house shortly, which was planned. Had another very much unplanned visit on Tuesday that ended up costing us the equivalent of a nice vacation. More about those next week, probably. I had planned on saving my latest RN post for after I finish my current book. I’ll go ahead and post what I have to get some content up for my loyal readers.

The Barn – Wright Thompson
One of the most difficult books I’ve ever read. Thompson dives deep into the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago who was lynched by white men while visiting family in Mississippi. Not just about the murder or resulting acquittal of the men who killed him. But also about the environment in Mississippi at the time and how it got to be that way. Thompson went way back, to when the earliest Europeans made it to Mississippi and their interactions with the native people of those lands, through the age of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and into the Jim Crow era. Along the way he ties little moments of history together to explain how (some) Southern whites harbor grievances against their northern counterparts. He also jumps ahead to today, to examine how the truth of the Till murder has long been buried in Mississippi, at least amongst the white population.

This is important to Thompson because he grew up a few miles from the barn where Till was tortured and likely murdered before his body was weighed down and thrown into a river. Despite being the son of progressive Democrats who fought for civil rights, Thompson had no idea about the history of the barn. How on earth could that happen, he wonders? Well, turns out a lot of white folks thought it was better just to move on and never discuss it rather than honor Till’s memory and maybe teach their children to treat people who looked different than them a little better than their grandparents did.

Like I said, this was a difficult read. Each day, though, I think it becomes increasingly important to keep stories like Emmett Till’s alive as a minority of Americans who have taken over power think it’s better to hide the more disturbing parts of our history because it might make white people uncomfortable. Don’t get me started…

The Killing Of The Tinkers – Ken Bruen
Book two in Bruen’s Jack Taylor series. As with most book series, I don’t know that the bones of the story were much different from the first. That said, Bruen is such a good writer and the story is so tight and quick that I have no problems sticking with it.