Confederacy of Silence

I finished Richard Rubin's Confederacy of Silence, the story of a 21-year-old New Yorker, who graduates from college, and when no other options present themselves, takes a job as a reporter for the newspaper in Greenwood, Mississippi. It's part memoir, part courtroom drama, and interesting throughout. I thought the book started off a little slowly; Rubin spent a lot of time on ambience and setting, and perhaps even a little too much time on himself in the first 150 pages or so. Somewhere around page 250, though, the whole enterprise built up a huge head of steam and carried me right through to the end. It ends up being a thoroughly depressing work, as it follows the trajectory and subsequent plummet of Handy Campbell, a young gentlemen we meet as a high school quarterback and leave as an accused murderer. If you like nonfiction (as I do, I am a nonfiction whore), I recommend this book, and I think that Rubin's next book, whatever he writes on, will be even better.