The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson
by Jeffrey Toobin
View on GoodreadsJeffrey Toobin's definitive contemporaneous account of the O.J. Simpson murder trial — published less than a year after the verdict and built on his New Yorker reporting — arguing that race, deliberately injected by the defense, became the organizing fact of the case and its outcome.
Core ideas
- Toobin's central claim, foreshadowed in his 1994 New Yorker piece "An Incendiary Defense," is that the defense strategically converted a strong evidentiary case into a racial referendum on the LAPD, with Mark Fuhrman as the chosen villain — Robert Shapiro's later admission that they "dealt the race card from the bottom of the deck" is the book's emblematic line.
- The prosecution's failures are treated as compounding rather than decisive — Toobin's measured verdict is that it is "ultimately unknowable" whether even flawless prosecution could have overcome a defense determined to make the trial about race and police misconduct.
- The book reads as a prequel to American mass culture — celebrity, cable saturation, the Kardashian orbit, media-driven narrative — diagnosing in 1996 the spectacle dynamics that would define the decades after.
Published1996
Pages466
ISBN9780679441700
ReadJun 2026
