A Case for Solomon by Tal Mcthenia

A Case for Solomon by Tal Mcthenia

A Case for Solomon tells the spellbinding story of one of the most celebrated kidnapping cases in American history, and a haunting family mystery that took almost a century to solve.

A CASE FOR SOLOMON: BOBY DUNBAR AND THE KIDNAPING THAT HAUNTED A NATION chronicles one of the most celebrated--and most misunderstood--kidnapping cases in American history. In 1912, four-year-old Bobby Dunbar, the son of an upper-middle-class Louisiana family, went missing in the swamps. After an eight-month search that electrified the country and destroyed Bobby's parents, the boy was found, filthy and hardly recognizable, in the pinewoods of southern Mississippi. A wandering piano tuner who had been shuttling the child throughout the region by wagon for months was arrested and charged with kidnapping--a crime that was punishable by death at the time. But when a destitute single mother came forward from North Carolina to claim the boy as her son, not Bobby Dunbar, the case became a high-pitched battle over custody--and identity--that divided the South.

Amid an ever-thickening tangle of suspicion and doubt, two mothers and a father struggled to assert their rightful parenthood over the child, both to the public and to themselves. For two years, lawyers dissected and newspapers sensationalized every aspect of the story. Psychiatrists, physicians, criminologists, and private detectives debated the piano tuner's guilt and the boy's identity. And all the while the boy himself remained peculiarly guarded on the question of who he was. It took nearly a century, a curiosity that had been passed down through generations, and the science of DNA to discover the truth.

A Case for Solomon is a gripping historical mystery, distilled from a trove of personal and archival research. The story of Bobby Dunbar, fought over by competing New Orleans tabloids, the courts, and the citizenry of two states, offers a case study in yellow journalism, emergent forensic science, and criminal justice in the turn-of-the-century American South. It is a drama of raw poverty and power and an expos of how that era defined and defended motherhood, childhood, and community. First told in a stunning episode of National Public Radio's This American Life, A Case for Solomon chronicles the epic struggle to determine one child's identity, along the way probing unsettling questions about the formation of memory, family, and self.

McThenia, Tal: - Tal McThenia is a freelance writer who reported and wrote The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar, a one-hour radio documentary for the acclaimed public radio series This American Life. He has received residencies at the ShenanArt's Playwrights' Workshop and the MacDowell Colony. He lives in New York.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781439158609
ISBN 10	1439158606
Title	A Case for Solomon
Author	Tal Mcthenia
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Year published	2013-08-13
Number of pages	464
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable