Word: gilley
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...illustrate how works of scholarly reporting differ from Big China Books is to place two 2004 publications side by side: Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China by Ian Johnson and China's Democratic Future: How It Will Happen and Where It Will Lead by Bruce Gilley. Both are by authors who draw on lengthy experience reporting on China and are interested in democracy and civil society. Gilley claims to know what the future holds for China. Johnson, though, focuses on telling a series of revealing tales about acts of resistance, like efforts by a crusading lawyer...
...President of the United States should not be named Obama," chimed in stylist Gina Gilley...
...contrast, it took only a few hours to catch the killer in Kathryn Harrison's While They Slept (Random House; 290 pages). Early on the morning of April 27, 1984, Billy Frank Gilley Jr., then 18, beat his parents and his sister Becky to death with a baseball bat in their home in Oregon. He said afterward that he did it to save himself and his other sister Jody from an abusive domestic situation. He imagined that they would run away together. Jody called...
...sister echoes an episode of incest in Harrison's life. "I find [their story] has a forbidden, sexual charge," she writes. "Because love, murder and running away together do imply sex. They do suggest an illicit erotic fixation." There's something very creepy about her interest in the Gilley murders that is difficult for the reader to make peace with--she is not just a clarifying, interpreting narrator; she also makes herself a specimen to be gawked...
Harrison rummages heroically through the detritus of Gilley family life, which is certainly authentically depressing: poverty, alcoholism, physical and emotional abuse. But the deep, human reality of Billy's act eludes her--he is a dull, nasty subject, with none of the thwarted, Romantic brilliance with which Capote endows his subjects. Or maybe the problem is that she grasps Billy's truth too well, and that While They Slept suffers from an excess of honesty. That's something Capote certainly avoided in In Cold Blood. When it comes to true crime, too much truth can be fatal...