Saturday, February 7, 2015

2015 Reading Challenge Book 025 Life after Death by Damien Echols

BOOK TITLE-Life after Death
AUTHOR-Damien Echols
FORMAT-Hardcover
FIRST TIME READING-Yes
COST-$5.87

While looking around Walmart about a week ago I saw a nice sight. A few times a year they put out a huge bin of hardcover books. Which are marked way down.I have almost always lucked out and found great biographies. The cover caught my eye. Then I saw who the author was. And with it being $6 pretty much I grabbed it.

It was sometime in 96ish that I first heard about the West Memphis 3 case. Since then I had somewhat kept up on what was happening. When this book came out a few years back I had wanted to read it. But never thought to ILL it from the library. 

The book is half the story of Damien's childhood and teen years,half prison journal. The childhood and teen years turned out to be the most interesting.Even after close to 20 years of me reading stuff about Damien and the other 2 guys,there was still lots of stuff in this part that was new to me.

The prison journal stuff is decent. But got a little repetitive.Damien's thoughts on religion ,while very different from mine, were so well explained that I could totally see his point of view. He practices a mixture of Buddhism and Christianity. Taking the parts of each that are similar and merging it all into a way for him to deal with the hell that is his life.

I have no idea how interesting this will be to someone that doesn't at least know the basic stuff about the WM3 case. But if you have seen one of the many documentaries about the case,this book is a good source of more information.

Life after Death by Damien Echols gets a 3.95 outta 5.