Honor Killing: Race, Rape, and Clarence Darrow's Spectacular Last Case

Stannard, David E.

ISBN 10: 0143036637 / ISBN 13: 9780143036630

Published by Penguin Publishing Group, 2006

About this Item

The book is complete and readable, with all pages and cover intact. Dust jacket, shrink wrap, or boxed set case may be missing. Pages may have light notes, highlighting, or minor water exposure, but nothing that affects readability. May be an ex-library copy and could include library markings or stickers.

Seller Inventory # BSM.1AKED

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Honor Killing: Race, Rape, and Clarence Darrow's Spectacular Last Case
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0143036637
• ISBN 13: 9780143036630
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: acceptable

About this title

Synopsis

In the fall of 1931, Thalia Massie, the bored, aristocratic wife of a young naval officer stationed in Honolulu, accused six nonwhite islanders of gang rape. The ensuing trial let loose a storm of racial and sexual hysteria, but the case against the suspects was scant and the trial ended in a hung jury. Outraged, Thalia’s socialite mother arranged the kidnapping and murder of one of the suspects. In the spectacularly publicized trial that followed, Clarence Darrow came to Hawai’i to defend Thalia’s mother, a sorry epitaph to a noble career.

It is one of the most sensational criminal cases in American history, Stannard has rendered more than a lurid tale. One hundred and fifty years of oppression came to a head in those sweltering courtrooms. In the face of overwhelming intimidation from a cabal of corrupt military leaders and businessmen, various people involved with the case—the judge, the defense team, the jurors, a newspaper editor, and the accused themselves—refused to be cowed. Their moral courage united the disparate elements of the non-white community and galvanized Hawai’i’s rapid transformation from an oppressive white-run oligarchy to the harmonic, multicultural American state it became.  

Honor Killing is a great true crime story worthy of Dominick Dunne—both a sensational read and an important work of social history

About the Author

David E. Stannard received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is a professor of American studies at the University of Hawai’i. A Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and American Council of Learned Societies fellow and a widely recognized authority on Hawai’ian history and culture, he has written five previous books, including American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World.