Houston Chronicle :: The Trials of Eroy Brown

Bookish picks: 2011 Texas Titles
Reviewed by Maggie Galehouse

We are encouraged to buy local and regional in grocery stores and farmers’ markets.

Why not buy books with the same philosophy — to support Texas authors, stories and presses?

All the 2011 books listed below have a strong Texas connection.

Happy reading!

100,000 Hearts
By Denton A. Cooley, M.D.
Buy It Now

100,000 Hearts: A Surgeon’s Memoir, by Denton Cooley, M.D. (UT Press) Cooley, who founded the Texas Heart Institute in 1962, grew up in Houston and attended the University of Texas. While in medical school at Johns Hopkins, Cooley assisted in an operation to help correct a congenital heart defect in an infant. This led him to specialize in heart surgery.

Crazy from the Heat

By James H. Evans

Buy It Now

Crazy From the Heat: A Chronicle of Twenty Years in the Big Bend by James H. Evans. (University of Texas Press). This photography book offers landscapes and panoramas — in both black and white, and color — of the biggest state park in Texas. People, plants, animals, objects, even an “exploded view” of ‘Shirley’s Fried Pie’ make this collection personal and universal.

The Trials of Elroy Brown

by Michael Berryhill

Buy It Now

The Trials of Eroy Brown, by Michael Berryhill. (UT Press) In 1981, a black inmate at the Ellis prison farm near Huntsville killed two white Texas prison officials. The man who admitted to killing them, a burglar and robber named Eroy Brown, surrendered, claiming self-defense. The Trials of Eroy Brown focuses on Brown’s defense and is based on trial documents, exhibits, and journalistic accounts of Brown’s three trials, which ended in his acquittal.




See the entire list at chron.com »

Dallas Morning News :: The Trials of Eroy Brown

The Trials of Elroy Brown

by Michael Berryhill

Buy It Now

Book on infamous prison killing case to be published by UT Press
By Diane Jennings/Reporter
Jun. 9, 2011

Thirty years ago the case of a Texas inmate, Eroy Brown, who was acquitted in the killing of two prison employees, shocked Texas prison officials. Now a book about the episode is being published by the University of Texas Press.

The Trials of Eroy Brown The Murder Case that Shook the Texas Prison system tells the story of the convicted burglar who admitted shooting a farm manager and struggling with a warden until he drowned in a ditch. Brown claimed he was acting in self defense and was tried three times. The first time he went to court ended in a mistrial, then two separate juries acquitted Brown of each death.

The publisher says defense attorneys Craig Washington, Bill Habern and Tim Sloan, "undertook heroic strategies" on behalf of Brown.
"I knew he was innocent," Habern says. "The evidence convinced the jury."

Habern says he's glad to see the publication of The Trials of Eroy Brown. "I thought the story would never be told."

The book by Michael Berryhill, chairman of the journalism department at Texas Southern University, costs $29.95 and will be released in October.

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