A Hanging in Detroit: Stephen Gifford Simmons and the Last Execution under Michigan Law Book

Pretty dry reading, the way historical surveys tend to be -- because they're surveys, one damn factoid after another. This is not to say it isn't informative. I think it's most useful when summarizing and giving some historical and (sometimes) intellectual context for landmark cases through the 19th and 20th centuries. I would also register my persistent disagreement with the author, whose conservative ideology, though he demonstrably strives to write in an evenhanded way, is apparent. This is not a criticism of the study itself, which would amount to criticizing it for being written from a perspective, which is silly; it's just an observation of the character of my engagement with it, which was frequently oppositional.