Presenter: Richard Adams Carey
On August 19, 1997, in little Colebrook, New Hampshire, a 62-year-old carpenter named Carl Drega, a man with long-simmering property rights grievances, murdered state troopers Scott Phillips and Les Lord at a traffic stop in a supermarket parking lot. Then Drega stole Phillips's cruiser and drove downtown to settle some old scores. By the end of the day, three more were dead, Drega among them, and four wounded. Occurring on the eve of America's current plague of gun violence, this tragic event made headlines all over the world and shocked New Hampshire out of a previous innocence. Touching on facets of North Country history, local governance, law enforcement, gun violence, and the human spirit, Richard Adams Carey describes a community that was never a passive victim but a brave and resilient survivor.
About Richard Adams Carey
Richard Adams Carey grew up in Connecticut, attended Harvard, and worked various low-paying jobs before going to teach in the Yupik Eskimo villages of western Alaska. His first book, "Raven's Children," was described by Alaska Magazine as "the best book on Alaska since John McPhee's classic 'Coming Into the Country.'"
The New York Times praised "Against the Tide" as "deep ecological journalism at its best, a worthy successor to such classic portraits of American fishermen as William W. Warner's 'Beautiful Swimmers' and Peter Matthiessen's 'Men's Lives.'"
"The Philosopher Fish," said Kirkus Reviews is "a book about America in microcosm. Caviar, as it turns out, is not just tasty. In Carey's hands, it's luminous."
Carey's new book, "In the Evil Day," concerns a 1997 shooting incident in Colebrook, New Hampshire. Said Booklist, "Carey's tension-filled report of a small town's terror is portrayed with surprising love, bittersweetness, and hope, resuting in a beautifully written and enthralling true crime tale."
Carey lives in Sandwich, New Hampshire, and teaches in the MFA fiction and nonfiction program of Southern New Hampshire University.
