Publishers Weekly....This is Gripping Reading

Books like this clearly are not the kind of books that are going to obtain a wide readership easily, or bring a writer quick acclaim. But they are exactly the kinds of books that our society needs.
Writers can at their best, through skill and courage become the conscience of a nation.

Mrs. Dicks has done this. Her voice is clear, her vision penetrating and sound. Her books deserve to be published and they deserve to be read. Dicks pulls no punches in her novel, Congregation of the Condemned which covers most of the full range of how men and women get to death row.
 

It's not a pretty book not faintly scented with lilacs, not for those who scream for REVENGE It's a book written by the mother of a death row inmate which accurately relates her struggles and that of her son. It will show the reader how strong a mother's love is and how far she is willing to go to save her son's life.

This book is a hard hitting, truthful, sometimes horrifying look at the ultimate punishment inflicted in the United States today. It can make you gasp in relief that it's not you sitting alone and forlorn in an 8 by 10 cell waiting to be burned, hanged, shot, or injected. It can make you see the death penalty for what it really is. It can make you see the condemned for what most of them really are; HUMAN BEINGS! And if Shirley Dicks is successful, it can make you want to say STOP IT
 

Congregation of the Condemned features such people as Senator Edward Kennedy, Mike Farrell, Mario Cuomo, Hugo Bedau, Tom Wicker, Peter Gabriel, Coretta Scott King, and many others.
These essays call for a distinction between justice and revenge, perhaps best summed up by the mother of one crime victim, "If you can't give me back my son in life, don't kill in his name."
 

                      Order from your local book store