It’s not due out until next week, but Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case is already generating online buzz — and big preorders (as of today, Amazon.com is ranking it 370 in all book orders). Written by the National Journal columnist Stuart Taylor Jr. and the historian K.C. Johnson — and with glowing blurbs from names like the columnist George Will, the ACLU president Nadine Strossen, and even John Grisham — it takes a slam at how academics, Duke administrators, the news media, and the prosecutor responded to accusations of rape leveled at several Duke lacrosse players last year.
At Cliopatria, a group blog of historians, Ralph E. Luker is calling it “KC’s Moment.” He notes, however, that Scott Eric Kaufman’s blog Acephalous, finds the book’s anti-intellectualism “positively Horowitzian in tenor and substance.”
As for Johnson, at the blog he set up for covering the controversy, Durham-in-Wonderland, he’s now taking the Duke University Press to task for the “pedagogical slant” of its list, which he says publishes a disproportionate share of academics who leapt to pillory the lacrosse players.
Expect a lot more next week, after people receive their books.
