My Friends by Fredrik Backman

My Friends by Fredrik Backman is a lovely novel that features the characters of Joar, Ali, Ted, KimKim (the artist), and Louisa. Also important to the story are Christian (a twenty year old budding artist and school janitor) and his mom (an art teacher at a university).

The book begins with a meeting between the artist as an adult in the final days of his life and Louisa as a just turned eighteen year old orphan who has recently lost her best friend. It then turns into a journey by Ted and Louisa, with Ted telling the story of the childhood friendship shared twenty-five years prior by Joar, Ali, Ted and the artist.

A central part of the story is a famous painting done by the artist (known as C. Jat, the initials of Christian and his friends), with The One of the Sea his first work when he fourteen years old and including his three friends as tiny figures in the painting. Backman writes very well about connections and My Friends covers friendship, finding your people ("one of us"), and life coming full circle. The four were damaged souls from difficult homes who found each other. They grow to share a language with each other, including "Here!" "Tomorrow!" and "I love you and I believe in you."

Joar was focused on the artist becoming a successful painter so he could escape their town and his difficult life. The start of the artist's painting career was also triggered by meeting Christian, who said to paint like the birds sing and the best art is painting not what you see, but what you feel. Later, the artist would describe his work as painting the way his friends laughed. When the four friends were young, they broke into a museum and hung The One of the Sea on the wall, which brought Christian's mother into their lives, and would become circled back on at the end. One thing about the the book is it feels at times to be going a direction, then surprises you.

The Emerald Mile by Kevin Fedarko

The Emerald Mile by Kevin Fedarko is a really good book subtitled The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon. Fedarko details both a 1983 wooden dory trip 277 miles down the Colorado River, one intended by Kenton Grua and two others to set the mark for fastest float through the Canyon, and the potentially cataclysmic events at the dam upstream that made the speed run possible. 

Huge El Niño rains in 1983 causing the water level at Lake Powell, held back from the Colorado River by the Glen Canyon Dam, to rise to within feet of its top. Lake Powell holds some nine billion gallons of water and the dam supplies power for many parts of the west. The book also details the harnessing of water for electricity, citing that dams covered almost every major river except the Yellowstone, including twenty-nine on the Mississippi, thirty-six on the Columbia, and forty-two on the Tennessee. 

The Glen Canyon Dam was built with spillway tunnels on either side, but it was discovered that cavitation had occurred in the tunnels, with repeatedly high water pressure straining the concrete, causing water to go into the bedrock. Rocks and dirt then further damaged the tunnels and were tossed into the river. 

It was never said in the book that the dam at risk of failing, like in the Johnstown tragedy of 1889 where thousands died, but even lesser possibilities included things that could have been calamities, ranging from overtopping of the dam to the bedrock eroding so much that water from Lake Powell make its way around the dam. Engineers had plywood put up to raise the height of the dam by several feet while the spillway problem could be worked on, and released huge amounts of water into the Colorado River. 

This created the largest flow of water down the river in a generation, making conditions dangerous for rafters, and tantalizing for Grua and the two others on The Emerald Mile. The trip down the river is typically several weeks and they finished in just over thirty-six hours, breaking the prior speed record by more than ten hours.

Fedarko provides a detailed and interesting account of the float down the river, events at the dam, including the engineering experts who worked the crisis, and the Grand Canyon itself. He writes of how remarkable it is, and how river trips often feature side hikes, with guides talking about the geology of the Canyon. 

Framed by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey

Framed by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey is a solid nonfiction work with ten stories of wrongful arrest, conviction, and imprisonment, with five by each man. McCloskey works with Centurion Ministries, a group dedicated to exonerating innocent people wrongly convicted, and Grisham is on the board of directors of both Centurion and the Innocence Project. There are twenty-three defendants across the ten wrongful conviction stories, with four that were on death row, two who came within days of being executed, and one who was. 

Three of the stories to highlight are that of Todd Willingham, Joe Bryan, and the Norfolk Four. Willingham was put to death by the state of Texas for the house fire that took the lives of his three children, examined by David Grann for The New Yorker with the piece "Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?" Joe Bryan was arrested for the murder of his wife Mickey in Clifton, Texas, where Joe was a principal, away at a conference at the time of the murder. The Norfolk Four features police concocting stories of what they believe happened, and then fitting evidence that fits their theories, ignoring evidence that disproves them. As new evidence would come to light disproving a police theory in the case, they would arrest another as an accomplice, and create a new theory. Then once that theory was disproved, they would arrest another purported co-conspirator and create a new made-up narrative. 

Police in these cases were often desperate to show their small towns that the killer not at large, and other examples of shoddy, malicious, or illegal police work included the following...

- Long interrogations and convincing people that maybe they did commit the crimes while sleepwalking. 

- Medical examiners who seem to specialize in autopsies that tell whatever story police want to be told.

- Jailhouse informants put in as cellmates for the purpose of them "hearing a confession."

- Hiding of evidence, that which was legally required to make available to the defense.

- Relying on shoddy work around areas like bloodstain analysis or fire investigation.

The stories of police misconduct in the ten stories are horrifying, and illustrate the importance of people asserting their Miranda rights so they not interviewed without a lawyer present.