Title: Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders.
Author: Christopher Goffard.
Genre: Non-fiction, articles, journalism, true crime.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2018.
Summary: A collection of 15 articles, by a staff writer of Los Angeles Times. The Accusations sees a woman going through a nasty custody battle with her ex when she accuses him of a brutal and violent attack and rape, but the further the investigation gets, the less the woman's story lines up with the truth. In Healing Sergeant Warren, a man who saves one of his friends in an explosion during a mission in Iraq, faces guilt, shame, and PTSD as he tries to heal with the help of intense VR exposure therapy. Riders looks at the lives of drifters who jump freight trains as a lifestyle, through a sweet but ultimately tragic love affair of a young couple enamored with freedom. The $40 Dollar Lawyer follows a fresh-out-of-law-school young man who is forced to take the Public Defender job, and grows into a confident and capable lawyer and defense attorney over the consequent year as he gains pride and faith in his job. The Choice is a story of a family that flees from Aleppo to Turkey during the Syrian Civil War, but when the mother moves to Sweden in hopes of eventually bringing the family and children, requiring daily blood transfusions, over as well, she faces difficulties with immigration and hope. In The Hidden Man, a gay U.S. soldier struggles with and keeps his identity secret for years, afraid of losing his life and livelihood, but has a chance to stand up for his full identity when "Don't Ask Don't Tell" comes under debate again, during Obama's election campaign. The Prisoner looks at the lives of children of those on death row, through Shawn, a 13-year-old who has only known his father in prison, but wrongly yet vehemently believes he is innocent, and will come home one day. In Framed, a petty and small occurrence leads to an inexplicable vendetta that causes a couple of wealthy lawyers to plant drugs in a car of a local beloved elementary school volunteer and PTA president, which leads to years of tangled litigation. In The Exile, an aged Black Panther in Tanzania exiled in his youth from U.S., dreams of his Kansas upbringing and pledges the last of his life to philanthropy and showing the orphans he has adopted the ocean and the expansity of the world. In The Rookie, discovering his older sister's body when he was just a child and watching the police struggle selflessly to find her killer, inspires Jeremy to become a policeman himself. In Border Warrior, a man vehemently opposed to the Bush administration and a member of Minutemen, a group who patrol the U.S./Mexican border trying to catch refugees, feels more and more disconnected in values from his fellow vigilantes. In Dirty John, a 59-year-old given up on the prospect of finding love again falls deeply for a man that sounds almost too good to be true, but what starts as a whirlwind romance quickly devolves into fear, violence, and lies, when she finds out he is far from who he claims he is, and his social and romantic resumé is as long as it is terrifying. In The Deserter's Son, haunted by and seeking pardon for his father's desertion in WWII, a Vietnam war vet tries to enlist in the navy at 60, obsessed with redeeming his father's shame. In How She Found Him, an elderly dying Vietnamese woman travels across the world to Los Angeles, to find her son, whose letters stopped coming four years ago, against unbelievable and seemingly insurmountable odds. Old Men and the Sea looks at the hobby of building boats, dominated primarily by older single men, who race against time at the end of their lives, hoping to eventually die sailing their own vessels.

My rating: 7.5/10
My review:

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