To Susan, who thought William D. Cohan's THE PRICE OF SILENCE was frightening

Susan, if you think THE PRICE OF SILENCE was frightening, stay away from the truthful book by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr., UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT. There, not in THE PRICE OF SILENCE, you get the terrifying story of the Gang of 88 professors at Duke who condemned the lacrosse team without evidence and the rogue prosecutor who to win an election accused three innocent young men of horrific crimes. In my 2007 review of UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT I said something like this--"more terrifying than any thriller you will read this year." Just read it in the daylight and skip the parts about the agony of the students and the parents and in the case of Michael Pressler the wife and children as well as the coach. If you read all of UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT the story will haunt you for years, as it haunts me.

For those who have not heard, Amazon (during another loud controversy) has become the battleground between puff promoters of a dishonest book (so agrees Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal) and two sets of opponents--people who have followed the Duke non-rape case since 2006 and remarkable people who have apparently come fresh to Cohan's book and grappled with it (as did Mark Wylie, a young professor way out at Spokane). With the mainstream media even more corrupt than it was in 2006, Amazon (despite all the possible stuffing and manipulations) is becoming the best reviewing organ in the country. Any place that can publish Mark Wylie's essay is a major reviewing organ, strange as that seems.