"With We Carry Their Bones, Erin Kimmerle continues to unearth the true story of the Dozier School, a tale more frightening than any fiction. In a corrupt world, her unflinching revelations are as close as we'll come to justice." — Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer-Prize Winning author of The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad
“Gripping….Kimmerle speaks eloquently to official crimes that have yet to be fully accounted for, giving a closely observed account of forensic investigation along the way. A horrific story of true crime, unjust punishment, and the quest for justice for the victims of a cruel state.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"With We Carry Their Bones, Erin Kimmerle continues to unearth the true story of the Dozier School, a tale more frightening than any fiction. In a corrupt world, her unflinching revelations are as close as we'll come to justice."
01/01/2022
New York Times best-selling authors Abrams and Fisher join forces with Gray, the young Black lawyer who served as Martin Luther King's defense attorney when King was tried for his part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to tell the story of the trial in Alabama v. King (150,000-copy first printing). Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bissinger chronicles The Mosquito Bowl, a football game played in the Pacific theater on Christmas Eve 1944 between the 4th and 29th Marine regiments to prove which had the better players (400,000-copy first printing). In The Spy Who Knew Too Much, New York Times best-selling, Edgar Award-winning Blum recounts efforts by Tennent "Pete" Bagley—a rising CIA star accused of being a mole—to redeem his reputation by solving the disappearance of former CIA officer John Paisley and to reconcile with his daughter, who married his accuser's son (50,000-copy first printing). Associate professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, Clague reveals how The Star-Spangled Banner became the national anthem in O Say Can You Hear? Multiply honored for his many history books, Dolin returns with Rebels at Sea to chronicle the contributions of the freelance sailors—too often called profiteers or pirates—who scurried about on private vessels to help win the Revolutionary War. With The Earth Is All That Lasts, Gardner, the award-winning author of Rough Riders and To Hell on a Fast Horse, offers a dual biography of the significant Indigenous leaders Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull (50,000-copy first printing). With We Refuse To Forget, New America and PEN America fellow Gayle investigates the Creek Nation, which both enslaved Black people and accepted them as full citizens, electing the Black Creek citizen Cow Tom as chief in the mid 1800s but stripping Black Creeks of their citizenship in the 1970s. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Hoffman's Give Me Liberty profiles Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá, who founded the Christian Liberation Movement in 1987 to challenge Fidel Castro's Communist regime (50,000-copy first printing). Forensic anthropologist Kimmerle's We Carry Their Bones the true story of the Dozier Boys School, first brought to light in Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Nickel Boys (75,000-copy first printing). Kissinger's Leadership plumbs modern statecraft, putting forth Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon, Lee Kuan Yew, and Anwar Sadat as game-changing leaders who helped create a new world order. From a prominent family that included the tutor to China's last emperor, Li profiles her aunts Jun and Hong—separated after the Chinese Civil War, with one becoming a committed Communist and the other a committed capitalist—in Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden. New York Times best-selling author Mazzeo (Irena's Children) reveals that three Sisters in Resistance—a German spy, an American socialite, and Mussolini's daughter—risked their lives to hand over the secret diaries of Italy's jailed former foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, to the Allies; the diaries later figured importantly in the Nuremberg Trials (45,000-copy first printing). A Junior Research Fellowship in English at University College, Oxford, whose PhD dissertation examined how gay cruising manifests in New York poetry, Parlett explains that New York's Fire Island has figured importantly in art, literature, culture, and queer liberation over the past century (75,000-copy first printing). Author of the New York Times best-selling Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy and a former CIA officer, Reynolds argues in Need To Know for the importance of U.S. intelligence during World War II in securing victory. As he reveals in Getting Out of Saigon, White was directed by Chase Manhattan Bank to close its Saigon branch in 1975 and went beyond orders by evacuating not just senior Vietnamese employees but the entire staff and their families (75,000-copy first printing).
★ 2022-04-12
Gripping investigation into a corrupt, dangerous Florida reform school, the institution featured in Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys.
Beginning in 1900, the Dozier School for Boys housed thousands of young men sentenced for presumed crimes, mostly minor infractions, who were at the mercy of their jailers and a Jim Crow system of injustice. Many died there, buried in forgotten graves. Forensic anthropologist Kimmerle arrived with years of experience under her belt, including examining the killing fields of the Balkans, and set to work trying to identify the remains of young men whose bones lay intermingled in a sort of potter’s field. Inevitably, her work expanded not just to embrace the bones she and a legion of volunteers uncovered, but also to comprehend “a historical justice question”: finding the identities of the dead and the causes of their deaths. Along the way, Kimmerle unveils a corrupt, racially structured system that swept up young men, mostly Black, hired out to work for local plantations and factories in “a vicious cycle designed to keep the wheel of cheap labor turning.” Many of the deaths resulted from savage beatings by guards and fellow inmates goaded by their captors in a kind of fight-club scenario that enabled killing by proxy. The bones told stories: “a lot of boys between twelve and fourteen. One who was twenty-one and died while paroled to a farm, presumably to work for his bus fare home.” The Florida system has been dismantled—sort of, anyway, as “but one institution within a system structured to define people by color and class” that endures—but Kimmerle speaks eloquently to official crimes that have yet to be fully accounted for, giving a closely observed account of forensic investigation along the way.
A horrific story of true crime, unjust punishment, and the quest for justice for the victims of a cruel state.
06/10/2024
Forensic anthropologist Kimmerle (anthropology, Univ. of South Florida), takes listeners on a journey into a dark past, recounting the efforts of her team to unearth the truth about the Dozier School for Boys. Kimmerle recounts her own background with mass grave excavation across the globe as a precursor to explaining how she and her team spent 2012–16 using modern technology and good old-fashioned research to investigate and uncover the remains of more than 50 children. These boys, mostly poor and Black, were buried in unmarked graves after being made inmates at a reform school that operated in the Florida panhandle for more than a century. Janina Edwards imbues her narration with sympathy and tenderness for the deceased boys and their families seeking answers, while not neglecting the anger many of the traumatized survivors and living relatives hold about being left in the dark for decades. Edwards's brisk tone for Kimmerle's description of her scientific process keeps the narrative moving forward, while her spot-on Florida accents evoke recognition for anyone familiar with the area. VERDICT This moving tribute is highly recommended to listeners of Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys.—Natalie Marshall
Janina Edwards narrates in a tone of detachment that gives the listener room for horror. Her narration is meticulous, but she doesn’t overplay the outrage. Forensic archaeologist and writer Erin Kimmerle dug up the campus of the notorious Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. Founded in 1901, the facility didn’t close until 2011. Everybody knew there was a graveyard, but Kimmerle found more skeletons than expected. Edwards cants her voice so that the listener is shocked, but unable to turn away. There is little question that boys—mostly Black—were beaten to death or shot. This is not a happy story, but Edwards takes the time for us to absorb the history of cruelty. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. B.H.C. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Janina Edwards narrates in a tone of detachment that gives the listener room for horror. Her narration is meticulous, but she doesn’t overplay the outrage. Forensic archaeologist and writer Erin Kimmerle dug up the campus of the notorious Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. Founded in 1901, the facility didn’t close until 2011. Everybody knew there was a graveyard, but Kimmerle found more skeletons than expected. Edwards cants her voice so that the listener is shocked, but unable to turn away. There is little question that boys—mostly Black—were beaten to death or shot. This is not a happy story, but Edwards takes the time for us to absorb the history of cruelty. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. B.H.C. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine