Bøger af William Deverell

"Arthur Beauchamp takes a break from the courtroom to write a memoir so he can set the record straight about a headline murder case he fought as a young lawyer in 1966. The trial would either mark him as a pathetic loser or thrust him into the top ranks of criminal counsel. The background: in 1966, a young housemaid was raped by her employer, a callous and vindictive millionaire. She shot him point blank, so it seemed an open-and-shut case of first-degree murder. Enter Arthur Beauchamp, a young lawyer haunted by having bungled his only previous murder case. He is now called upon to defend a murder that he is almost certain can't be won. But as the trial speeds through twists and turns, his slashing cross-examinations bring hope that the jury might entertain a reasonable doubt. In present time, Arthur learns that writing about his social gaffes, booze, and sex is not easy, especially as his efforts are regularly interrupted by the quirky characters who inhabit his supposedly idyllic Garibaldi Island."--

Is someone systematically killing the judges of the B.C. bar? At least one has been murdered and several have disappeared. Arthur Beauchamp returns from retirement to take on the case, this time defending his former nemesis, backwoods poet Cudworth Brown, and tracking down a mystery novel that Brown's unreliable former lawyer has been writing.

When an oddball group of ecology-minded people determine that a chemical factory is producing an agricultural pesticide that is also killing bees, they decide to sabotage its manufacture. Criminal lawyer Arthur Beauchamp is tasked with their defense in a tense, hang-by-the-fingernails trial.

Kathy Fiscus tells the story of the first live, breaking-news TV spectacle in American history. At dusk on a spring evening in 1949, a three-year old girl fell down an abandoned well shaft in the backyard of her family's home in Southern California. Across more than two full days of a fevered rescue attempt, the fate of Kathy Fiscus remained unknown. Thousands of concerned Southern Californians rushed to the scene. Jockeys hurried over from the nearby racetracks, offering to be sent down the well after Kathy. 20th Century Fox sent over the studio's klieg lights to illuminate the scene. Rescue workers-ditch diggers, miners, cesspool laborers, World War II veterans-dug and bored holes deep into the aquifer below, hoping to tunnel across to the old well shaft that the little girl had somehow tumbled down. The region, the nation, and the world watched and listened to every moment of the rescue attempt by way of radio, newsreel footage, and wire service reporting. They also watched live television. Because of the well's proximity to the radio towers on nearby Mount Wilson, the rescue attempt because the first breaking-news event to be broadcast live on television. The Kathy Fiscus event invented reality television and proved that real-time television news broadcasting could work and could transfix the public.

The aim of this collection of essays is to stress the cultural aspects of the Jewish experience of coming to, and living in, the Golden State. The contributors explore how the Jews who settled in California helped shape the state's culture and were, in turn, molded by cultural influences that were uniquely Californian.