An exhaustively detailed account of one of the last lynchings to take place in the United States, Smead's work is also simply exhausting. Compared with earlier, grislier, more sensational color-based killings, there's very little to the murder of Mack Charles Parker, and the book does little to compensate for this. Despite a wealth of research, and the violent act at the heart of the tale, BLOOD JUSTICE lacks any real sense of drama, or emotion. The participants in the killing, and in the investigation that followed, are ciphers, and fail to engage the reader one way or another, whether to detest or admire. The highly-publicized search for Parker's killers is stripped down to a catalogue of who, what, and where, making the heart of the book the dullest portion to read. This isn't helped at all by the numbing similarity of so much that was said and done during the manhunt, a fact that might cause a reader to think that an identical section of pages had been printed several times over, as the same people repeat the same things again and again.

While the lynching of Mack Charles Parker is a significant part of the American civil rights conflict of the '50s and '60s, and deserves attention, Smead's work does little more than prove that not every historical event deserves treatment in book form. What happens in BLOOD JUSTICE could easily have been distilled to half the length, or less, and been placed inside a larger work without robbing the story of its power.

I read this for a History class and I found it interesting. Nuff said.

They removed my last review, maybe this one will make it. Don't buy this book. Its written by a pack of convoluted thinking leftist bedwetters. if you want a factual book about the U.S. Constitution buy one published by the Cato Institute.

This book is a wonderful resource for someone interested in learning about the constition. This book walks you through the constitution line by line explaining and giving examples from actual court cases along the way. It's a little bit old, but I think it's definitly worth reading as a first look at the constitution.

I took this book for an entry level Computer Information Systems course. I found that I had to buy another book to understand it therefrore I believe that it is not really for beginnners with no programming abilities.

Written in the 1950's, this book displays a remarkable lack of research and fact. Read S.W. Harman's 'Hell on the Border' instead. The book reflects more about the time it was written than the the person it is describing.