In this book, psychologist and scholar Jewelle Taylor Gibbs puts the Rodney King and O.J. Simpson trials under the microscope to show that the issue of race was at the very heart of both of these emotionally charged cases. And, she observes, given the racial and ethnic composition of the members of the two juries, their verdicts were all but predictable in view of their different experiences with the police. The book reviews the turbulent events of the so-called trials of the century and examines them from a social and political framework of race relations and police misconduct. The author points out that King and Simpson, two apparently dissimilar men, came from remarkably similar backgrounds. And she shows how their trials have linked them forever as symbols of the different worlds inhabited by blacks and whites in America.