The Thin Red Line

And then it went fast.

Yesterday afternoon a not particularly humpy UPS guy (Ron quipped ‘I thought that was illegal’) dropped off a box from Earthlink. David came over after work and he and Ron fiddled with things a bit and today we have broadband again, wireless networked to two computers. We are thrilled with the speed. David was very pleased he got it to work after not being able to get the laptop online on Linux a couple of weeks back. (The latest on that is that we will try re-installing XP and see if we can’t get the lappy onto our wireless as well.)

I previously read and blogged about Jed Horne’s Katrina Book Breach Of Faith and recently happened upon this 2005 title detailing the story of Curtis Kyls who was arrested for the 1984 murder of Dolores Dye in a supermarket parking lot. The cover blurbs compare it to In Cold Blood and Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, and it does read like a novel, a real page turner. Kyls, who insisted all along that he had nothing whatever to do with Dye’s murder, spent 14 years incarcerated at Orleans Parish Prison and the Angola Penitentiary as his case wound through 5 trials, 4 hung juries, one conviction and an appeal that went all the way to the US Supreme Court, making it one of the most litigated murder cases in history. He was ultimately released in 1998 when Orleans district attorney Harry Connick declined to begin work on a sixth trial.

Regardless of whether you believe Kyls did or did not kill Dye, the case represents a serious mis-carriage of justice, which Horne amply demonstrates was emblematic of the troubled criminal justice system in Louisiana in the 80’s and 90’s. (Horne himself flatly states that he does not know whether or not Kyls is guilty of the crime and leaves it for the reader to determine.) I remember when I read and blogged about Bayou Farewell, remarking how despite having grown up in New Orleans just 75 miles or so away the Cajun coast was a world I had known very little of and with this book I was again struck by what a different and foreign world the people in this book inhabited, just a very few miles from where I grew up. Recommended.

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Another Katrina book today. Like The Great Deluge, Breach of Faith documents Katrina’s assault on New Orleans through the stories of dozens of people who lived through it. While Deluge strictly limited itself to the week or so surrounding the storm, Breach covers approximately 6 months after the event. Where Deluge focused a lot on FEMA and gave a somewhat sympathetic view of Michael Brown, Breach focused more on the post storm political maneuvering and utterly savages "Brownie".

As a native of New Orleans I probably have an unusually high degree of interest in reading about Katrina and its aftermath and thoroughly enjoyed this book. But honestly I can’t imagine that most people who have read one of the other Katrina books would have the patience for another 400 page rendering of the story. That said, Breach is very well written and does not seem to have drawn the sorts of criticism that Deluge did. If you still have the stomach for reading more on Katrina, this one comes highly recommended.

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