Witness for the Defense
The political trials in these works are riveting.

BY BRUCE WATSON
Saturday, September 8, 2007 12:01 a.m.

1. "The Trial" by Franz Kafka (Knopf, 1937).

"The Trial" contains no trial, and it is, of course, fiction. Yet the ordeal that besets Franz Kafka's Joseph K. makes this the best of all books about political trials. Like no work about a single case, "The Trial," first published in Germany in 1925, masterfully blends all the horrors of political persecution into one succinct nightmare. "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K.," it famously begins, explaining his sudden arrest on charges he never discovers. K. is then plunged into a frightening world of polite but cunning prosecutors, self-serving lawyers and the star-chamber proceedings of a monolithic, sinister judicial system. Like every political prisoner, K. has desperate moments when all seems lost, followed by vain hopes that justice will prevail. All political trials and their narratives are, in some sense, "Kafkaesque."

2. "The Great Conspiracy Trial" by Jason Epstein (Random House, 1970).

Midway through the 1969 trial of the Chicago Seven, during an exchange between dour Judge Julius Hoffman and defendant Abbie Hoffman (no relation), the Yippie activist said: "It's good theater, your honor." And it was, especially as depicted by Jason Epstein in "The Great Conspiracy Trial," the longtime Random House editor's account of the prosecution springing from the violent protests during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Here are the ragtag defendants blowing kisses to the jury. Here is Judge Hoffman ordering defendant Bobby Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom. Here is the counterculture, with witnesses including Pete Seeger and Norman Mailer, being tried by the "Establishment." Could an American trial have been this rude, this raw, this overtly political? Only in the '60s.

3. "Summer for the Gods" by Edward J. Larson (Harvard, 1997).

Equal parts political fight, religious battle and media circus, the Scopes Trial in 1925 was labeled "the trial of the century" even before John Scopes was dragged into a Tennessee courtroom for teaching his high-school students about evolution. In Edward J. Larson's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Summer for the Gods," the author brings a novelist's eye to depicting each telling moment: civic leaders deciding that a headline trial might put Dayton, Tenn., on the tourist map; lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan sparring over the Bible; the jury returning a guilty verdict, and the judge handing down a wrist-slapping fine. But the trial fills only a third of the book. In the section titled "Before," Larson explores the converging histories of religious fundamentalism and evolution. "After" shows how the Scopes Trial, by mocking fundamentalists, fueled a fight for respect and influence in public schools that carries on to this day.

4. "Big Trouble" by J. Anthony Lukas (Simon & Schuster, 1997).

J. Anthony Lukas spent eight years researching the 1907 trial of Industrial Workers of the World union leader "Big Bill" Haywood, who was charged with murdering Idaho's governor in retaliation for his crushing a miners' strike. The book that resulted, "Big Trouble," abounds in colorful characters, including the draconian Pinkerton detective James McParland; the rotund, radical Haywood in his Stetson hat; and Theodore Roosevelt, who branded Haywood an "undesirable citizen." At 880 pages, "Big Trouble" may tell you more than you need to know about railroad construction, detective work and even old-time baseball, but it is a fascinating portrait of turn-of-the-century class animus, Progressive Era politics, and the days when labor and capital had little in common but mutual contempt.

5. "Entertaining Satan" by John Demos (Oxford, 1982).

Dozens of books have been written about the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, but in "Entertaining Satan" historian John Demos turned his lifelong fascination into the definitive study. As much psychology as history, Demos's book puts Puritans on the couch, analyzing the attitudes of accusers and victims and the collective conscious of Salem and other New England villages where witches were tried. The accused witches of Salem, he finds, were social misfits--maverick midwives, brazen women, men who dared to sue their neighbors. At a time when settlers lived on the murky border of an uncertain wilderness, the trials drew a bright line between black and white. Meticulously documented yet highly readable, "Entertaining Satan" brings alive the mother of all "witch hunts."

Mr. Watson is the author of the recently published "Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind" (Viking).