Praise for The Last Lawyer

Rege Behe of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review gives a nice overview of John Temple's The Last Lawyer. The book, described by Behe as "often riveting," follows the true inside story of Ken Rose's decade-long of a death row inmate.

A landmark legal case that received scant attention from judges or journalists, the Jones case involves the thorniest issues of death penalty law: inadequate defense, mental retardation, mental illness, and shaky witness testimony. Yet for many years, Rose’s arguments gained no traction, and Bo Jones came within three days of his execution.

Author John Temple follows Rose through a decade of setbacks and triumphs as he gradually unearths the evidence he hopes will save his client’s life. During this same time, Rose also single-handedly builds a nonprofit law firm that becomes a major force in the death penalty debate raging across the South. Behe goes on to say:

John Temple's reasoned account of the case of Bo Jones, a North Carolina man sentenced to death for the murder of a store owner is balanced and nuanced. It reads more like a best-selling novel than a dry, blow-by-blow account.

The Last Lawyer is now available from University Press of Mississippi. For more information visit http://johntemplebooks.com/book.php 

UPM Fall BOOKFRIENDS Party Announced

On Sunday, November 22 from 3–5 p.m. the University Press of Mississippi will be holding its annual BOOKFRIENDS fall membership party at The Auditorium Restaurant at the Duling School. This year’s party will honor the memory of Willie Morris on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth.

To mark the occasion UPM is featuring a new, limited edition of the quintessential Morris essay, My Two Oxfords. This edition includes a foreword by Morris’ widow, Joanne Prichard Morris, and features a photograph from his son, David Rae.

In this piece, he addresses the quirky circumstances of having lived in “two of the world’s most disparate places.” He writes of the two Oxfords in his life—Oxford University in England where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar in the 1950s and Oxford, Mississippi, the home of the University of Mississippi, where he was writer-in-residence at the time. “May I suggest there are similarities but not all that many?” he says.

Edwin M. Yoder, a longtime friend of Willie Morris from their Oxford University days, will be speaking at the event. Yoder is a Pulitzer prize-winning editorialist, author and political columnist. Yoder is also the author of The Historical Present published by University Press of Mississippi. 

Praise for Lost Plantations of the South

John Sledge had a great piece in yesterday's Mobile Press-Register about Marc Matrana's latest book, Lost Plantations of the South. Matrana's book is an illustrated history of grand plantation homes that have been lost to war, disaster, and neglect. Sledge notes that Matrana's exploration of plantation homes is "well-written, accessible and free from academic or architectural jargon."

An excerpt from the article is below:

Stories like these have made Matrana passionate about promoting the importance of historic preservation, even to people whose hearts may not be warmed by the subject of slaveholders’ mansions. “Lost plantations still hold great cultural significance for Americans,” he argues. “These estates and their inhabitants were once the principal cultural, economic, and political institutions of the South. And, as much as they represent the glory of antebellum times and great achievements in art and architecture, these long gone plantations also represent man’s inhumanity to man — vanished physical evidence of American slavery.” The few plantations that remain, he declares, “must be closely and aggressively protected” if we are to have any profound understanding for the era.

Click here to see Marc Matrana discussing his passion for historical preservation at the 2009 Louisiana Book Fair.