Evan Meisner thought he had a lot of life ahead of him at twenty-two. Instead, he became one of the 103 people murdered in Oakland, California, in 2011. Not Just Another Killing in Oakland is an intriguing blow-by-blow account of People v. Gadlin. From jury selection to the final verdict and sentencing, David H. Fleisig writes with meticulous detail about the events that led to the murder of Evan Meisner, the arrest of the main suspect, and the trial that followed. As a juror and civil trial lawyer, Fleisig offers a unique perspective of what happened in and out of the courtroom and why the jury found no reasonable doubt Gadlin was guilty of the murder. As a father and lawyer, Fleisig goes beyond alibis and trial testimony to explore what lies at the heart of any murder-the shattering of the victim's life and the impact it had on the lives of those he left behind. This book provides insight into what the district attorney, public defender, lead detective, key witnesses, and Evan's family did before and during the trial and their reactions to the outcome. After reading this book you will have an understanding of how the criminal justice system worked, including how the jury's deliberations lead to its verdict.

Over 13 months in 1976-1977, four children were abducted in the Detroit suburbs, each of them held for days before their still-warm bodies were dumped in the snow near public roadsides. The Oakland County Child Murders spawned panic across southeast Michigan, triggering the most extensive manhunt in U.S. history. Yet after less than two years, the task force created to find the killer was shut down without naming a suspect. The case "went cold" for more than 30 years, until a chance discovery by one victim's family pointed to the son of a wealthy General Motors executive: Christopher Brian Busch, a convicted pedophile, was freed weeks before the fourth child disappeared. Veteran Detroit News reporter Marney Rich Keenan takes the reader inside the investigation of the still-unsolved murders--seen through the eyes of the lead detective in the case and the family who cracked it open--revealing evidence of a decades-long coverup of malfeasance and obstruction that denied justice for the victims.

When a nineteen-year-old member of a Black Muslim cult assassinated Oakland newspaper editor Chauncey Bailey in 2007—the most shocking killing of a journalist in the United States in thirty years—the question was, Why? “I just wanted to be a good soldier, a strong soldier,” the killer told police. A strong soldier for whom? Killing the Messenger is a searing work of narrative nonfiction that explores one of the most blatant attacks on the First Amendment and free speech in American history and the small Black Muslim cult that carried it out. Award-winning investigative reporter Thomas Peele examines the Black Muslim movement from its founding in the early twentieth century by a con man who claimed to be God, to the height of power of the movement’s leading figure, Elijah Muhammad, to how the great-grandson of Texas slaves reinvented himself as a Muslim leader in Oakland and built the violent cult that the young gunman eventually joined. Peele delves into how charlatans exploited poor African Americans with tales from a religion they falsely claimed was Islam and the years of bloodshed that followed, from a human sacrifice in Detroit to police shootings of unarmed Muslims to the horrible backlash of racism known as the “zebra murders,” and finally to the brazen killing of Chauncey Bailey to stop him from publishing a newspaper story. Peele establishes direct lines between the violent Black Muslim organization run by Yusuf Bey in Oakland and the evangelicalism of the early prophets and messengers of the Nation of Islam. Exposing the roots of the faith, Peele examines its forerunner, the Moorish Science Temple of America, which in the 1920s and ’30s preached to migrants from the South living in Chicago and Detroit ghettos that blacks were the world’s master race, tricked into slavery by white devils. In spite of the fantastical claims and hatred at its core, the Nation of Islam was able to build a following by appealing to the lack of identity common in slave descendants. In Oakland, Yusuf Bey built a cult through a business called Your Black Muslim Bakery, beating and raping dozens of women he claimed were his wives and fathering more than forty children. Yet, Bey remained a prominent fixture in the community, and police looked the other way as his violent soldiers ruled the streets. An enthralling narrative that combines a rich historical account with gritty urban reporting, Killing the Messenger is a mesmerizing story of how swindlers and con men abused the tragedy of racism and created a radical religion of bloodshed and fear that culminated in a journalist’s murder. THOMAS PEELE is a digital investigative reporter for the Bay Area News Group and the Chauncey Bailey Project. He is also a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. His many honors include the Investigative Reporters and Editors Tom Renner Award for his reporting on organized crime, and the McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage. He lives in Northern California.

A chilling account of the murders of two hunters in rural Michigan—a mystery that haunted a community and baffled the police for two decades. In the bitter cold of 1985, two buddies from Detroit embark on a hunting trip to the Michigan wilderness, unaware they will soon become the hunted. The eerie silence surrounding their sudden disappearance is broken after nearly two decades when a relentless investigator inspires a terrified witness to break her silence. The witness narrates a haunting scene that had unfolded years back, pointing fingers at the prime suspects—the Duvall brothers. With no bodies unearthed, the justice system is riveted by the startling revelations during an electrifying trial in 2003. The brothers, Raymond and Donald Duvall, had bragged about the murders, evocatively explaining how they dismembered their victims and fed them to pigs. Despite the shocking confession, the case holds its ground purely on a single witness’s account, taking the courtroom through a labyrinth of dark secrets and sinister acts. This gripping thriller presents a vivid tale of crime that reveals the devastating power of evil.

Out of Oakland offers a wonderful case study in the possibilities and limitations of transnational organizing. ― Diplomatic History In Out of Oakland, Sean L. Malloy explores the evolving internationalism of the Black Panther Party (BPP); the continuing exile of former members, including Assata Shakur, in Cuba is testament to the lasting nature of the international bonds that were forged during the party's heyday. Founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the BPP began with no more than a dozen members. Focused on local issues, most notably police brutality, the Panthers patrolled their West Oakland neighborhood armed with shotguns and law books. Within a few years, the BPP had expanded its operations into a global confrontation with what Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver dubbed "the international pig power structure." Malloy traces the shifting intersections between the black freedom struggle in the United States, Third World anticolonialism, and the Cold War. By the early 1970s, the Panthers had chapters across the United States as well as an international section headquartered in Algeria and support groups and emulators as far afield as England, India, New Zealand, Israel, and Sweden. The international section served as an official embassy for the BPP and a beacon for American revolutionaries abroad, attracting figures ranging from Black Power skyjackers to fugitive LSD guru Timothy Leary. Engaging directly with the expanding Cold War, BPP representatives cultivated alliances with the governments of Cuba, North Korea, China, North Vietnam, and the People's Republic of the Congo as well as European and Japanese militant groups and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In an epilogue, Malloy directly links the legacy of the BPP to contemporary questions raised by the Black Lives Matter movement.

The sheer energy and passion and intensity, the linguistic virtuosity of Eric Miles Williamson's latest novel, WELCOME TO OAKLAND, will leave readers breathless. The vigor and uncensored redneck honesty of T-Bird Murphy's blue-collar voice will at turns delight, offend, amuse and enrage readers as T-Bird gives us what we're not supposed to hear: the groans, gritos and war-whoops of men when they're not behaving like gentlemen, when they're out of sight and earshot, when they're wrapped around their drinks at Dick's Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge or your local workingman's watering hole. In WELCOME TO OAKLAND, the T-Bird Murphy of Williamson's internationally acclaimed novel, East Bay Grease, is now a man. He's been divorced twice, and he finds himself hiding out in a garage in rural Missouri for a reason we're never told, confused and stunned, shell-shocked by the hand life has dealt him. He opens his story, "I'm always happiest when I live in a dump, and I've lived in some serious shitholes," but it's difficult to believe him. What unfolds is the story of a workingman who tries his hardest to escape the hell of the Oakland ghetto, who finds honor in squalor, kinship among the broken divorcees of Dick's Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge, dignity and beauty at the garbage dumps where he sleeps in the cab of the scow he drives for a living.

The riveting New York Times bestseller and Stonewall Book Award winner that will make you rethink all you know about race, class, gender, crime, and punishment. Artfully, compassionately, and expertly told, Dashka Slater's The 57 Bus is a must-read nonfiction book for teens that chronicles the true story of an agender teen who was set on fire by another teen while riding a bus in Oakland, California. Two ends of the same line. Two sides of the same crime. If it weren’t for the 57 bus, Sasha and Richard never would have met. Both were high school students from Oakland, California, one of the most diverse cities in the country, but they inhabited different worlds. Sasha, a white teen, lived in the middle-class foothills and attended a small private school. Richard, a Black teen, lived in the economically challenged flatlands and attended a large public one. Each day, their paths overlapped for a mere eight minutes. But one afternoon on the bus ride home from school, a single reckless act left Sasha severely burned, and Richard charged with two hate crimes and facing life imprisonment. The case garnered international attention, thrusting both teenagers into the spotlight. But in The 57 Bus, award-winning journalist Dashka Slater shows that what might at first seem like a simple matter of right and wrong, justice and injustice, victim and criminal, is something more complicated—and far more heartbreaking. Awards and Accolades for The 57 Bus: A New York Times Bestseller Stonewall Book Award Winner YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults Finalist A Boston Globe-Horn Book Nonfiction Honor Book Winner A TIME Magazine Best YA Book of All Time A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist Don’t miss Dashka Slater’s newest propulsive and thought-provoking nonfiction book, Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed, which National Book Award winner Ibram X. Kendi hails as “powerful, timely, and delicately written.”