An excerpt of sorts

For your reading pleasure, may I direct readers to my just-finished three-part series at The American Street, titled "Hate on Fat Tuesday". It's a firsthand account of my experience at the 2001 Seattle Mardi Gras Riots:

Part 1: Blood on the Streets

Part 2: A Twice-Shaken City

Part 3: The Hole in the Law

Most of this text is taken from a chapter of Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America -- due on the shelves in June -- that we wound up excising altogether. (I've included in the third part of the series a capsule description of most of the events of the book, to lend it some context in this version.) It was a bit of an experiment, sort of a twist near the end of the book, which spends most of the preceding 250 or so pages examining the problem of hate crime with an emphasis on rural America, and it didn't work, so we pulled it. It's still a worthwhile piece of storytelling, though, so I've republished it here. Hope you enjoy.