MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewIn 1910, Asbury Park, N.J., was in its glory days as a seaside escape. The town was a candy-colored Victorian fantasy of wholesome amusements — an elaborate whirling carousel, the Crystal Maze fun house, baby parades. But, as Alex Tresniowski skillfully recalls in The Rope: A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP, it was a fantasyland built for whites ... What plays out makes for riveting reading, although the book inexplicably lacks endnotes or a bibliography, making it difficult to assess the accuracy of Tresniowski’s account. And in the end, the two strands of his narrative don’t quite come together. The Smith case was only tangential to the founding of the N.A.A.C.P., and you can’t help feeling that he uses Wells’s story to try elevating an otherwise solid true-crime tale into something akin to a social justice crusade, which seems a stretch.
