Perry Deane Young (1941–2019)

What is a non-fiction author to do when there are no facts?

The story of Frances "Frankie" Silver is folklore in North Carolina, and resulted in a fairly well-known ballad that became famous in large part because of recordings by Clarence Ashley. But what we actually know is fairly slight: Frankie Stewart/Stuart married Charles Silver when both were teenagers in backwoods North Carolina; they had a daughter within a year. Soon after, Charles disappeared. Best guess is that he threatened to murder Frankie. and she killed him with an axe and dismembered his body and burned it. She was taken into custody, convicted of murder, and after various legal maneuvers and petitions for clemency, she was hung in 1833.

But beyond that, little is known. We don't have a coroner's report. We don't have proper reports of the trial. There is no record of the execution. Even the handful of records we have are often so illiterate that one wonders if they can be safely interpreted.

Into this mess came Perry Deane Young, who did (I think) an admirable job of correcting many false accounts written by other -- and of disentangling such records as there are.

Problem is, a full account of everything we know would take, oh, maybe twenty or thirty pages. Fifty at most. You can't publish a book with just fifty pages! So, to bulk things up to something big enough to make a (slender) book, we get a lot of asides and irrelevancies about things like backwoods life, the history of the governor of North Carolina, and the local landmarks. I can't blame Young for puffing up his book. But it made it a bit of a slog to try to get through the irrelevances to the facts.

What does come out pretty clearly is that Frankie didn't deserve her fate. She was (probably) abused. She had a lousy lawyer, or at least he was talked into a lousy defense strategy. She lived at a time when the law put excessive burdens on the defense, and denied her the right to speak for herself. And so... she died. One can only hope it wouldn't happen today. And that people can learn from this account of when it did happen.

Or, at least, the parts that are about Frankie and not about fluff.… (plus d'informations)

This is a great book about a man's journey on finding himself and his self acceptance of his homosexuality. I think it was very courageous of what he did, it took a lot of courage for him to "come out". Although it was sad the way his parents, brother and aunts treated him after he "came out" they just completely shun him and talked bad about him about his gayness. It was a good thing that he had such good friends that supported him though his family's rejection of his gayness. I praise Kopay for what he did because he was the first athlete that had ever "come out" publicly and he had changed the face of Homosexuality, people saw and read about him being gay and seeing that he was a football player and thought "If he's gay and say it out loud, why can't I?". He is possibly the one that change the course of TV as we know it today and let shows like "Queer as Folk" and "1 girl, 5 guys" be okay to be on TV (I love those shows).

I agree with Kopay and some others in this book about how people's sexual preferences is a private matter and it shouldn't effect someone's job or rather they get a specific job or not. In a way he made me understand gays better and made me realize that gays are everywhere even in sports. I don't have a problem with gays, matter of fact I love gay people they are awesome and they seem to be funnier then straight people, I love people that can make me laugh and they sure do. I support gays and their rights completely, I don't see anything wrong with gays being together, if they love each other then just let them be.… (plus d'informations)