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Since its release in fall 2017, the "Dirty John" podcast—about a conman who terrorizes a Southern California family—has been downloaded more than 20 million times, and will soon premiere as a scripted drama on Bravo starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana. The story, which also ran as a print series in the Los Angeles Times, wasn't unfamiliar terrain to its writer, Christopher Goffard. Over two decades at newspapers from Florida to California, Goffard has reported probingly on the shadowy, unseen corners of society. This book gathers together for the first time "Dirty John" and the rest of his very best work.
"The $40 Lawyer" provides an inside account of a young public defender's rookie year in the legal trenches. "Framed" offers an unblinking chronicle of suburban mayhem (and is currently being developed by Netflix as a film starring Julia Roberts). A man wrongly imprisoned for rape, train-riding runaways in love, a Syrian mother forced to leave her children in order to save them, a boy who grows up to become a cop as a way of honoring his murdered sister, another boy who struggles with the knowledge that his father is on death row: these stories reveal the complexities of human nature, showing people at both their most courageous and their most flawed.
Goffard shared in the Los Angeles Times' Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2011 and has twice been a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing. This collection—a must-read for fans of both true-crime and first-rate narrative nonfiction—underscores his reputation as one of today's most original journalistic voices.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
November 13, 2018 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781982113261
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781982113261
- File size: 3632 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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A staff writer for the Los Angeles Times presents a collection of swift-flowing pieces about outliers, liars, victims, and victimizers.Goffard (You Will See Fire: A Search for Justice in Kenya, 2011, etc.), whose work now appears on a podcast and in a new Bravo series (both called Dirty John), is a talented storyteller who eliminates most barriers to his work by employing basic vocabulary, lots of dialogue, short paragraphs, many textual divisions, and other reader-friendly techniques. And the tales themselves are gripping. Ranging in length from a handful of pages to more than 60 (the title story), Goffard's pieces include, among others, the cases of a man mistakenly jailed for rape and torture, an injured Iraq veteran, youthful runaways hopping trains, a young lawyer on the rise, a PTA president framed for drug possession by a couple of rich, vindictive lawyers, a former Black Panther living and teaching in Tanzania, and, the wildest story of all, "Dirty John," the tale of a talented and vicious con man who insinuated himself into the lives of lonely women, took their money, and grew violent when truths about him emerged. Although each of the pieces stands on a firm foundation of research, Goffard is able to keep the action and tension so prominent that his research seems almost invisible at times--invisible but nonetheless essential. He ends the collection with a couple of heart-wringers: the story of a Vietnamese woman coming to the U.S. in search of her suddenly silent son and the tale of an elderly man building a boat that he hopes will one day carry him to a death at sea.Although Goffard's style remains virtually the same in all of his stories, his characters and their often bizarre lives and predicaments accelerate the heart and animate a variety of emotions.
COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)
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