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A Case for Solomon: Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping That Haunted a Nation

Amazon.com Price:  $14.39 (as of 06/05/2019 13:22 PST- Details)

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A Case for Solomon tells the spellbinding story of one of the crucial celebrated kidnapping cases in American history, and a haunting circle of relatives mystery that took almost a century to solve.

A CASE FOR SOLOMON: BOBBY DUNBAR AND THE KIDNAPPING THAT HAUNTED A NATION chronicles one of the crucial celebrated—and most misunderstood—kidnapping cases in American history. In 1912, four-year-old Bobby Dunbar, the son of an upper-middle-class Louisiana circle of relatives, went missing in the swamps. After an eight-month search that electrified the country and destroyed Bobby’s parents, the boy used to be found, filthy and hardly recognizable, in the pinewoods of southern Mississippi. A wandering piano tuner who had been shuttling the child all the way through the region by wagon for months used to be arrested and charged with kidnapping—a crime that used to be punishable by death at the time. But when a destitute single mother came forward from North Carolina to claim the boy as her son, not Bobby Dunbar, the case became a high-pitched battle over custody—and identity—that divided the South.

Amid an ever-thickening tangle of suspicion and doubt, two mothers and a father struggled to assert their rightful parenthood over the child, both to the public and to themselves. For two years, lawyers dissected and newspapers sensationalized each aspect of the story. Psychiatrists, physicians, criminologists, and private detectives debated the piano tuner’s guilt and the boy’s identity. And the entire at the same time as the boy himself remained peculiarly guarded at the question of who he used to be. It took nearly a century, a curiosity that had been passed down through generations, and the science of DNA to discover the truth.

A Case for Solomon is a gripping historical mystery, distilled from a trove of personal and archival research. The story of Bobby Dunbar, fought over by competing New Orleans tabloids, the courts, and the citizenry of two states, offers a case study in yellow journalism, emergent forensic science, and criminal justice in the turn-of-the-century American South. This is a drama of raw poverty and power and an exposé of how that era defined and defended motherhood, childhood, and community. First told in a stunning episode of National Public Radio’s This American Life, A Case for Solomon chronicles the epic struggle to decide one child’s identity, along the way probing unsettling questions about the formation of memory, circle of relatives, and self.

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