Dig Into These Delicious Books About 90s Scandals
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The 90’s were a glorious time to be alive! We had Daria, we had JNCO jeans, we had Delia*s catalogs . . . and we had scandals galore. This was pre-24 hour news cycles so while it felt exciting and chaotic at the time, most of these narratives would today be reduced to a brief chyron at the bottom of your screen. Without access to non-stop news channels and websites overanalyzing each additional piece of information, we were at the mercy of tabloids and the 6 o’clock news. Today, each of these scandals inevitably would’ve birthed a podcast series. But it was the 90’s, so we’re left with books!
Here is a round up of books about some of the most salacious stories from the decade that gave us Clearly Canadian and Beavis and Butthead.
Tonya Harding
This study offers a critique of the media soap opera which unfolded after the attack on Nancy Kerrigan at the 1994 US Figure Skating Championships, with contributions by feminist academics, journalists and critics who were intrigued with the depiction of this event in the media and society. The essays included explore a number of issues raised by the Harding/Kerrigan scandal: the roles women are meant to uphold in public (and that public women are meant to play in private), the prices extracted for violations of notions of femininity, fantasies about social class and upward mobility, and the ways in which the media reaffirm gender and cultural stereotypes.
Olympic medalist Nancy Kerrigan is one of the most recognizable and admired athletes of our time. In her own voice, Kerrigan tells a truly fascinating story–her childhood determination to be the best at her sport, the continued support of her family, revelations involving her skating techniques, the Detroit attack that left her injured and propelled her into the media spotlight, and the difficulties of her new-found fame.
Finally, after over twenty years the truth has been told in this gripping tell all book. Complete with signed confessional statements, the events that led to the most infamous non-death case in American criminal history are told in horrific detail. You knew he did it and now he’s admitted it. All of the disgusting perversion, the sinister mind games, the grotesque physical abuse, and most of all… let’s not forget the rape… it’s all inside. If you like twisted then prepare to be wound up tighter with each passing page. YOU WON’T BELIEVE ALL THAT HE DID.
Rodney King and the L.A. Riots
While Rodney King is now an icon, he is by no means an angel. King has had run-ins with the law and continues a lifelong struggle with alcohol addiction. But King refuses to be bitter about the crippling emotional and physical damage that was inflicted upon him that night in 1991. While this nation has made strides during those twenty years to heal, so has Rodney King, and his inspiring story can teach us all lessons about forgiveness, redemption, and renewal, both as individuals and as a nation.
Anna Deavere Smith’s stunning new work of “documentary theater” in which she uses verbatim the words of people who experienced the Los Angeles riots to expose and explore the devastating human impact of that event.
In wrenching testimony, Lyle & Erik accused their father of sexually brutalizing then since they were children—claiming his sadistic acts of perversion and cruel violence drove them to their unspeakable crime.
Bestselling author Don Davis takes you inside one of the most riveting cases in California’s history, laying to bare the shattering secrets of a tormented family.
On June 28, 1993 Hazel Thornton showed up for jury selection. She spent the next seven months as a juror on a high-profile murder trial: The People versus Erik Menendez. Erik and his brother Lyle were on trial for shot-gunning their parents to death in their Beverly Hills home. In this book, she describes the day-to-day experiences of a juror.
O.J. Simpson
O.J. Simpson told how he hypotheticallywould have committed the murders. In response to public outrage that Simpson stood to profit from these crimes, HarperCollins canceled the book. A Florida bankruptcy court awarded the rights to the Goldmans in August 2007 to partially satisfy the unpaid civil judgment, which has risen to over $38 million with interest.
The Goldman family views this book as his confession and has worked hard to ensure that the public will read this book and learn the truth.
Without a Doubt is not just a book about a trial. It’s a book about a woman. Marcia Clark takes us inside her head and her heart. Her voice is raw, incisive, disarming, unmistakable. Her story is both sweeping and deeply personal. How did she do it, day after day? What was it like, orchestrating the most controversial case of her career in the face of the media’s relentless klieg lights? How did she fight her personal battles – those of a working mother balancing a crushing workload and a painful, very public divorce? When did she know that her case was lost? Who stood by her, and who abandoned her? And how did she cope with the outcome? As Clark shares the secrets of her own life, we understand for the first time why she identified so strongly with Nicole, in a way no man ever could. No one is spared in this unflinching account – least of all Clark herself, who candidly admits what she wishes she’d done differently – and, for the first time, we understand why the outcome was inevitable.
Monica Lewinsky. You know her name, you know her face, and you think you know her story: the pretty young intern who began an illicit affair with the President of the United States– a liaison that ignited an unprecedented political scandal and found Bill Clinton as the second U.S. president to ever be impeached. But there is much more to the Monica Lewinsky story than just that. Now, Andrew Morton, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Diana: Her True Story, takes you beyond the headlines and the sound bites to discover the real Monica Lewinsky, a woman as interesting, intelligent, and misunderstood as they come.
If the Watergate scandal was a previous generation’s National Nightmare, then maybe the Clinton scandal was our National Wet Dream, and who better to narrate it than the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas? In American Rhapsody, Eszterhas, whose credits include Basic Instinct and Showgirls, and Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse, for which he was nominated for a National Book Award, takes us through the events that threatened to topple a president and left most of the nation’s citizens with, at the very least, a bad taste in their mouths.
The Death of Princess Di
A year after Princess Diana’s tragic death in 1997, shocking revelations about her passing have surfaced via eyewitness testimony. From the nurse who covered her naked, lifeless body and who answered the queen’s immediate query of “where are the jewels?” to the off-duty paramedic who held Diana’s head in his hands, The Day Diana Died leaves no sacred rock unturned.
The Murders of Tupac and Biggie
Acclaimed journalist Randall Sullivan follows Russell Poole, a highly decorated LAPD detective who in 1997 was called to investigate a controversial cop-on-cop shooting, eventually to discover that the officer killed was tied to Marion “Suge” Knight’s notorious gangsta rap label, Death Row Records. During his investigation, Poole came to realize that a growing cadre of black officers were allied not only with Death Row, but with the murderous Bloods street gang. And incredibly, Poole began to uncover evidence that at least some of these “gangsta cops” may have been involved in the murders of rap superstars Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur.
For twenty years, gang unit detectives Tim Brennan and Robert Ladd patrolled the streets of Compton. They witnessed the birth and rise of gangsta rap with acts they knew personally, such as N.W.A and D.J. Quik; dealt firsthand with the chaos of the L.A. riots, its aftermath, and the gang truce that followed; were involved in the investigations of the murders of hip-hop stars Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G., and were major players in an all-out tug-of-war with City Hall that ultimately resulted in the permanent shut-down of the Compton Police Department.
Are there any other fascinating scandals of the 90’s that you’d love to read about?
Women On Ice: Feminist Responses to the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan Spectacle
Nancy Kerrigan: In My Own Words
Forever Scarred: The Unauthorized John Wayne Bobbitt Story
Bad Blood: The Shocking True Story Behind the Menendez Killings
Hung Jury: the Diary of a Menendez Juror
Monica’s Story
Once Upon a Time in Compton
