A couple weeks ago I recommended Ian Frazier’s epic New Yorker story about Siberia, and now I am here to recommend another epic New Yorker story. I once had grand ambitions about posting weekly reviews of each of the magazine’s issues, with my thoughts about the stories I’d read and recommending certain stories to certain people, depending on their interests. I don’t have the time or the hubris for that sort of thing, but I do want to try and get a few more people out there to read stories that I feel are among the best that today’s efforts in nonfiction and literary journalism have to offer.

It’s in that spirit that I recommend David Grann’s twenty-page story, “Trial By Fire” (Sept. 7), but with a strong caveat: this story will probably make you cry. It will probably also make you angry. In its first pages you will become convinced, almost without a doubt, that its subject, Cameron Todd Willingham, is an arsonist who murdered his three children. Then you will learn quite a bit of fascinating and troubling things about fire, the legal system, and arson investigation. Then you will gradually but steadily become convinced, almost without a doubt, that Cameron Todd Willingham was an innocent man executed by the state of Texas as the result not of any crime he committed, but of a sloppy judicial process, biased investigators, sophistry masquerading as science, a Board of Pardons and Paroles too lazy to investigate exculpatory evidence, and the notoriously archaic and draconian hand of Texas’ capital-punishment system.

It’s an easy, quick read, cognitively speaking; it’s a devastatingly difficult read, emotionally speaking.

Photo by Ken Light