The Barn

Name: The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
ISBN: 9780593299821

The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

Wright Thompson

2024·448 pages·Nonfiction

Biography Crime

gritty true crime

“The most brutal, layered, and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi, and really how the world conspired with the best and worst parts of Mississippi, I will ever read…Reporting and reckoning can get no better, or more important, than this.”
— Kiese Laymon

“The Barn is serious history and skillful journalism, but with the nuance and wallop of a finely wrought novel … The Barn describes not just the poison of silence and lies, but also the dignity of courage and truth.”
— The Washington Post

“With integrity, and soul, Thompson unearths the terrible how and why, carrying us back and forth through time, deep in Mississippi—baring sweat, soil, and heart all the way through.”
— Imani Perry

“It literally changed my outlook on the world…incredible.”
— Shonda Rhimes

“An incredible history of a crime that changed America.”
— John Grisham

A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare the long lead-up to the crime and how the truth was hidden for so long In summer 1955, two men, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, were charged with the torture and murder of the fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, and acquitted in a mockery of justice, leaving behind an ink cloud of a false confession. In The Barn, Wright Thompson reveals the true nature and location of the long night of hell that August: inside the barn of one of the killers, within the six-square-mile grid whose official name is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, fabled in the Delta of myth as the birthplace of the blues, and twenty-three miles from Thompson’s own family farm. Wright Thompson has a deep, local understanding of this story—the world of the families of both Emmett Till and his killers, the historical forces that brought them together in the same place, and how the crime came to loom so large. Putting the killing floor of the barn on the map of West Half, and the Delta, and America, is a way onto the road this country must travel if we are to heal our oldest, deepest wound.

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The Barn

The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

Wright Thompson

Year

2024

Pages

448

Type

Nonfiction

Biography Crime History & Politics

Praise

“The most brutal, layered, and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi, and really how the world conspired with the best and worst parts of Mississippi, I will ever read…Reporting and reckoning can get no better, or more important, than this.”
— Kiese Laymon

“The Barn is serious history and skillful journalism, but with the nuance and wallop of a finely wrought novel … The Barn describes not just the poison of silence and lies, but also the dignity of courage and truth.”
— The Washington Post

“With integrity, and soul, Thompson unearths the terrible how and why, carrying us back and forth through time, deep in Mississippi—baring sweat, soil, and heart all the way through.”
— Imani Perry