by Tim Madigan

The Burning is one of those books that pops up every couple of years--big, meticulous, so incomprehensibly tragic that as you're reading it you keep whispering to yourself that none of this could have happened, when of course all of it did. This is not simply a shocking chapter in the history of race relations in America, but a shocking chapter in all of history. It is a chpater swollen with sadness and wrenching horror and the very worst of humankind. The villainy is everywhere. A troubling book that lingers long after the last page has been turned.