The Run of His Life:
The People V. O.J. Simpson
By Jeffrey Toobin, Random House, 466 pages.

O.J. Simpson, like the Kennedys, it seems, will always be with us, at least in terms of best-sellerdom. Like the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the grotesque events surrounding Simpson's murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and waiter Ronald Goldman have left a deep social scar which time seems not to cover over. As each new book on the subject appears, we run out to the bookstore, compelled to scratch.

Jeffrey Toobin's book, "The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J.," brings the trial back in all its awfulness. Part farce, part breathtaking incompetence, part moral squalor, the case of O.J. Simpson threw up a deeply chilling mirror to America, and Toobin pushes our face right up against it.

Much we already know -- how the prosecution, thanks to Marcia Clark's self-defeating arrogance and Christopher Darden's hapless stupidity, blew the case virtually from day one; how the LAPD was more bungling and lazy -- and in the form of Det. Mark Furhrman -- more racist than most of us could have imagined; and how Jay Leno's schtick with the "dancing Itos" was quite appropriate, given the celebrity-besotted judge's wretched judicial performance.

Still, the sheer accumulation of it, as gathered by Toobin, a former prosecutor and now staff writer for The New Yorker, makes for an appalling, almost Shakespearean indictment. He is unsparing about the central characters: Robert Shapiro, for example, emerges as an utter hypocrite, always more concerned with his own fame and image than with the interests of his client. It was Schapiro, Toobin explains in sickening detail, who first played the "race card," despite his crocodile tears later. Marcia Clark, trumpeted as a feminist icon, also has some major character problems, to put it mildly. After reading Toobin's account, one has much more sympathy for her ex-husband who received such a roasting for raising child custody issues during the trial.

For me, the scariest part of the book came about halfway through, when Toobin analyzes the answers given by the 12 original jurors to the exhaustive questionnaire: Not one juror read a newspaper regularly; eight regularly watched trash-TV shows like "Hard Copy"; and five thought it was acceptable to use force on a family member.

And nine -- three quarters of the jury -- thought O.J. Simpson was less likely to have murdered his wife because he had excelled at football.

-- Andrew Ross

Andrew Ross is the managing editor of Salon.

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