Busman's Holiday

Mary Whisner, University of Washington School of Law, has published Bitten by the Reading Bug, at 105 Law Library Journal 113. Here is the abstract.

I read a lot in my spare time; sometimes my reading includes books about law. This essay discusses a number of recent books and explores how such reading can be helpful for a reference librarian. I begin with James E. Clapp et al., Lawtalk (2011), a wide-ranging book that uses colorful legal terms as springboards for discussions of legal history or policy. And then I have briefer discussions of books related to some of the topics in Lawtalk:

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010)

Alexandra Natapoff, Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice (2009)

David E. Stannard, Honor Killing: How the Infamous "Massie Affair" Transformed Hawai'i (2005)

Three memoirs about death penalty work:

• Andrea D. Lyon, Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer (2010)

• David R. Dow, Autobiography of an Execution (2010)

• Ian Graham, Unbillable Hours (2010)

Mark Prothero, Defending Gary (2006)

Death Penalty Stories (John H. Blume & Jordan M. Streiker eds., 2009) and Legal Ethics Stories (Deborah L. Rhode & David Luban eds., 2006)

Shon Hopwood, Law Man

Download the full text of the article from SSRN at the link.