Sarah Monette's Blog, page 22
March 17, 2014
March 16, 2014
5 things, Sunday, March 16
Mateusz Skutnik has released
Submachine 9
. I am beside myself with glee.
(If you want more Submachine, the entire series is here.)
Gandalf checks his email. BEST PHOTO EVAR.
I believe Catzilla turned off the little Cthulhu machine this morning by walking on it. Proof (a) that the people who designed the damn thing have never lived with a cat and (b) that my cat is THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL.
I had not known about EarlyWord until it was drawn to my attention that The Goblin Emperor got a nice shout-out on their GalleyChat summary for March 4.
There's also a very positive review from Justin Landon at Staffer's Book Review, who admits he went in prepared to hate the book and was won over anyway. I think that's the first time I've pulled that trick off.
(I know if you're reading this blog, you probably don't need to be persuaded to buy the book. Humor me.)
I finally have a day job that is both permanent and part-time (instead of working as a full-time temp, which is what I've been doing the past two and a half years). I am very happy with it; it has taught me that, oddly enough, I enjoy accounting, which is a piece of self-knowledge I wish I'd had in college. It satisfies the same part of my brain that likes Latin and calculus (and Submachine, come to think of it). And I totally get an endorphin cookie when my numbers balance.
Also, if anyone knows any good resources for DIY double-entry bookkeeping, please share! I took a Continuing Education Accounting Intro course, but the textbook, as it turned out, was not very reliable. And my employer is unlikely to be able to spring for accounting software any time soon, so it's just me and Excel.
(If you want more Submachine, the entire series is here.)
Gandalf checks his email. BEST PHOTO EVAR.
I believe Catzilla turned off the little Cthulhu machine this morning by walking on it. Proof (a) that the people who designed the damn thing have never lived with a cat and (b) that my cat is THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL.
I had not known about EarlyWord until it was drawn to my attention that The Goblin Emperor got a nice shout-out on their GalleyChat summary for March 4.
There's also a very positive review from Justin Landon at Staffer's Book Review, who admits he went in prepared to hate the book and was won over anyway. I think that's the first time I've pulled that trick off.
(I know if you're reading this blog, you probably don't need to be persuaded to buy the book. Humor me.)
I finally have a day job that is both permanent and part-time (instead of working as a full-time temp, which is what I've been doing the past two and a half years). I am very happy with it; it has taught me that, oddly enough, I enjoy accounting, which is a piece of self-knowledge I wish I'd had in college. It satisfies the same part of my brain that likes Latin and calculus (and Submachine, come to think of it). And I totally get an endorphin cookie when my numbers balance.
Also, if anyone knows any good resources for DIY double-entry bookkeeping, please share! I took a Continuing Education Accounting Intro course, but the textbook, as it turned out, was not very reliable. And my employer is unlikely to be able to spring for accounting software any time soon, so it's just me and Excel.
March 15, 2014
Lessons from the Little Cthulhu Machine
What the respiratory therapist will neglect to mention about your little Cthulhu machine: Getting the mask to seal is not automatic. Or easy. Or sometimes even possible.
What the respiratory therapist will also neglect to mention: The straps of the mask have a tendency to self-adjust. This is not a hidden features. This is a STUNNINGLY POOR DESIGN CHOICE.
What you will learn the hard way: Even if you get the mask to seal initially, odds are still good you will wake up in the middle of the night to discover it has slipped. At which point, odds become almost catastrophically poor that you will be able to get it to reseal without coming all the way awake, and also thrashing about a good deal. Swapping one mask for another may actually help, but that's a delicate and complex operation which you cannot turn the light on for, because your poor spouse is trying to sleep. ALso, see above re: AWAKE.
What the respiratory therapist WILL tell you when you ask for help: A water-based lubricant makes it easier to achieve a seal.
What the respiratory therapist WON'T tell you: Water-based lubricant dries out after about two hours, and there you are back to square fucking one.
What the Internet will tell you: A + D Ointment is great for getting a mask to seal!
What the respiratory therapist will tell you when you ask: Yes, it is, but it also eats your mask. OIL-BASED, LOSER.
What the respiratory therapist will also tell you: You might as well give it a try. If it works, you can decide if you want to buy masks more often.
What you already know: Your insurance will only cover a new mask every six months. Because only slackers would need one more often.
What you will learn the hard way: A + D does indeed help with achieving a seal. However, IT dries out after about 4 hours, and after that it is just as useless as anything else. Also, it leaves you feeling kind of greasy.
What will make you mad enough to chew nails and spit bullets: Saying fuck it all and turning off the machine for the rest of the night is not the answer. It only results in feeling like death on fried styrofoam in the morning.
What will make you throw in the towel for the night : The realization that, instead of getting back to sleep, you're writing this blog post in your head.
What the respiratory therapist will also neglect to mention: The straps of the mask have a tendency to self-adjust. This is not a hidden features. This is a STUNNINGLY POOR DESIGN CHOICE.
What you will learn the hard way: Even if you get the mask to seal initially, odds are still good you will wake up in the middle of the night to discover it has slipped. At which point, odds become almost catastrophically poor that you will be able to get it to reseal without coming all the way awake, and also thrashing about a good deal. Swapping one mask for another may actually help, but that's a delicate and complex operation which you cannot turn the light on for, because your poor spouse is trying to sleep. ALso, see above re: AWAKE.
What the respiratory therapist WILL tell you when you ask for help: A water-based lubricant makes it easier to achieve a seal.
What the respiratory therapist WON'T tell you: Water-based lubricant dries out after about two hours, and there you are back to square fucking one.
What the Internet will tell you: A + D Ointment is great for getting a mask to seal!
What the respiratory therapist will tell you when you ask: Yes, it is, but it also eats your mask. OIL-BASED, LOSER.
What the respiratory therapist will also tell you: You might as well give it a try. If it works, you can decide if you want to buy masks more often.
What you already know: Your insurance will only cover a new mask every six months. Because only slackers would need one more often.
What you will learn the hard way: A + D does indeed help with achieving a seal. However, IT dries out after about 4 hours, and after that it is just as useless as anything else. Also, it leaves you feeling kind of greasy.
What will make you mad enough to chew nails and spit bullets: Saying fuck it all and turning off the machine for the rest of the night is not the answer. It only results in feeling like death on fried styrofoam in the morning.
What will make you throw in the towel for the night : The realization that, instead of getting back to sleep, you're writing this blog post in your head.
March 10, 2014
UBC: Drennan
Drennan, William R. Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders. Madison, WI: Terrace Books-University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.
I first learned of the terrible death of Mamah Borthwick because of the fuss over her gravestone. (And I swear I read an article about her original gravestone and the question of who placed it--certainly not FLW as one internet source claims: he would never have put her married name on it--but I can't find the dang thing.) I was intrigued, and thus pleased to come across Death in a Prairie House.
This is an excellent book. Drennan has a lovely prose style, he puts his narrative together cogently, and while he is sympathetic to his protagonists, he is dryly unimpressed with their rhetoric. And he has no illusions about Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright was not a monster, but he was a narcissist of an exceptionally exalted degree. Anyone who can convince himself that in deserting his wife and six children he is actually doing what's best for them is a person with a gift.
It's difficult to get any sense of Mamah Borthwick herself, and I'm not entirely sure if that's because she left none of her own writing except her translations or if the black hole of Wright's ego drained all the individuality out of her--or if Drennan, for all his careful distance, got sucked in, too, and couldn't manage to see Borthwick around Wright. Or some combination thereof. But she is definitely an absence at the center of the book, seen only from Wright's solipsistic perspective. In talking about Wright's first marriage, Drennan quotes Wright's autobiography: "Frank had long dreamed of an ideal mate, some 'intimate fairy princess,' as he put it, a 'muse [and] selfless helpmate' who would unconditionally adore him . . . and spur him on to professional glory" (Drennan 27). His first wife failed by doing exactly what he asked of her: "Catherine bored him: no longer the golden girl of the 1890s, she had made the fatal error of becoming a matron. While her love for and devotion to Frank remianed steadfast, the demands of childrearing and Oak Park social life had left her, Frank reckoned, intellectually moribund" (Drennan 39). So what he wanted was a woman who was his intellectual equal, but also a muse and selfless helpmate. And, unbelievable though I frankly find it, Mamah Borthwick seems to have been exactly that. She was working on translating a Swedish feminist named Ellen Key in the last three years of her life, which gives us a clue about both her intellectual abilities and her philosophical position, but she also seems to have been perfectly content to abandon her own children and to let Wright install her at Taliesin, to be there whenever he wanted her but uncomplaining (as far as we know from Drennan) when he wasn't, even though her life cannot have been comfortable, given the reaction in Spring Green and surrounding communities to learning that Wright had built a house for his mistress in their midst.
Drennan analyzes what happened on the day of the murders (August 15, 1914) carefully and with an excellent eye for detail. It's odd that in every murder I've ever read about, there's always something that doesn't fit or can't be explained or doesn't seem to be possible. Either Julian Carlton was able to teleport, or he went without a pause from murdering Borthwick and her two children to serving soup to the six men who, in another moment, he would attempt to kill. He can't have followed the orthodox timeline of locking the six men in and setting the room on fire, then killing Borthwick and the children, then coming back to attack one of the men who had jumped out the window. As Drennan explains, the geography of Taliesin and the testimony of Herbert Fritz (one of the two survivors) make it physically impossible. But Drennan's alternate scenario requires, as he says, "a level of self-control in Carlton that is not so much inhuman as superhuman" (100). The facts we have can't be made into a story that makes sense. And yet it happened, whether we understand it or not. Seven people murdered and Taliesin burned (for the first time, but not the last).
Drennan is also very careful and thorough in his discussion of the murderer Julian Carlton, who had been hired as Taliesin's butler that summer. After he finished butchering his victims, he hid in the asbestos-lined furnace, and when he was discovered, he drank hydrochloric acid, presumably in the belief it would kill him quickly. It didn't. He lingered in miserable agony for seven and a half weeks before he died, unable either to breathe or eat through the acid-eaten tissues of his throat. Carlton did not explain his motive before his death, but Drennan makes some good speculations. What we know about him before he came to Taliesin tells us that he was paranoid and prone to fits of violent rage. His wife was terrified of him. He hated Taliesin (ironically, he and his wife had given their notice and August 15 was their last day of work), and he seems to have clashed more than once with the draftsmen who also lived at Taliesin. One of them called him a "black son of a bitch" three days before the murders (Carlton was of African or West Indian descent), and Carlton did tell the sheriff that in a later confrontation the same man struck him. Although Drennen doesn't quite go so far as to hypothesize explicitly that that man, Emil Brodelle, was Carlton's intended target and the rest of it--the murder of Borthwick and her children, the setting of the fire, the murder of the other draftsmen and workmen--was simply an effort not to leave any witnesses, he certainly lays all the pieces out for that speculation to be made. But whether it was that or something else, the crime was clearly disproportionate to the motive. John Cheney was 12; his sister Martha was 8. Whatever may have sparked Carlton's fury, there's no way to make their murders anything but psychotic rage.
The night after the murders, Frank Lloyd Wright buried Mamah Borthwick in the Unity Chapel cemetery. That sentence is literal. Although he had workmen dig her grave, he and he alone filled it in. He was buried next to her, according to his wishes, after his death in 1959. (He's not there any longer. When his third wife died in 1985, their daughter Iovanna had him exhumed, cremated, and interred with her mother's ashes in Arizona.)
But he refused to put a marker on her grave. "'All I had left to show for the strugle for freedom of the five years past that had swept most of my former life away, had now [itself] been swept away,' Wright said. 'Why mark the spot where desolation ended and began?'" (Drennan 156). He claimed that Taliesin II was a "'memory temple' . . . dedicated to Mamah Borthwick" (Drennan 125), but it isn't. Mamah Borthwick is a footnote and Taliesin is a shrine to the glory of Frank Lloyd Wright. He considered her death only as it affected him--and his grief was sincere and devastating, no doubt about that--and apparently there was no one to protest. Both her children were dead (not buried with her, though they died with her--their father had them cremated at Graceland Cemetery), her ex-husband was starting a family with his new wife, and whether her parents and two sisters were still alive or not, they seem to have lodged no comment of any kind. Borthwick's existence separate from Wright had been entirely expunged.
As an epigraph to his last, brief chapter--the history of Wright's life after Borthwick--Drennan quotes Ken Burns, "At some point, you have to forgive Frank Lloyd Wright for his excesses, his ego, his sensitivities, his horrible relations with his kids, and realize, on balance, that here was an extraordinary contribution to human history" (Burns qtd. in Drennan 154), and I'm sorry, but no you don't. Being a genius does not excuse anyone from the responsibility of being a decent human being. I agree that Wright was a genius and his influence on American art and architecture enormous, and I certainly don't think that we should go raze his buildilngs and ban his work from museums and libraries because he was a irresponsible narcissist. (Drennan's discussion of the Wright buildings that have been torn down, particularly the Imperial Hotel and the Midway Gardens, makes me want to cry.) But that doesn't mean we have to forgive him. We have to see him clearly.
If the living don't remember the dead, who will?
It's not clear when or how Mamah Borthwick's grave got its current marker. We don't know who felt strongly enough about her excision from history to make that very material protest. (John Ottenheimer, the man who designed and forcibly donated the second stone, said that in his seventeen years of residence at Taliesin, he never heard anyone mention her name. So much for the memory temple.) But someone did. That person--like John Ottenheimer, who is worried that the first stone is going to become illegible in another decade or so--is (or was) fighting uphill to remember the dead. And I feel strongly and irrationally that they are doing the right thing.
I first learned of the terrible death of Mamah Borthwick because of the fuss over her gravestone. (And I swear I read an article about her original gravestone and the question of who placed it--certainly not FLW as one internet source claims: he would never have put her married name on it--but I can't find the dang thing.) I was intrigued, and thus pleased to come across Death in a Prairie House.
This is an excellent book. Drennan has a lovely prose style, he puts his narrative together cogently, and while he is sympathetic to his protagonists, he is dryly unimpressed with their rhetoric. And he has no illusions about Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright was not a monster, but he was a narcissist of an exceptionally exalted degree. Anyone who can convince himself that in deserting his wife and six children he is actually doing what's best for them is a person with a gift.
It's difficult to get any sense of Mamah Borthwick herself, and I'm not entirely sure if that's because she left none of her own writing except her translations or if the black hole of Wright's ego drained all the individuality out of her--or if Drennan, for all his careful distance, got sucked in, too, and couldn't manage to see Borthwick around Wright. Or some combination thereof. But she is definitely an absence at the center of the book, seen only from Wright's solipsistic perspective. In talking about Wright's first marriage, Drennan quotes Wright's autobiography: "Frank had long dreamed of an ideal mate, some 'intimate fairy princess,' as he put it, a 'muse [and] selfless helpmate' who would unconditionally adore him . . . and spur him on to professional glory" (Drennan 27). His first wife failed by doing exactly what he asked of her: "Catherine bored him: no longer the golden girl of the 1890s, she had made the fatal error of becoming a matron. While her love for and devotion to Frank remianed steadfast, the demands of childrearing and Oak Park social life had left her, Frank reckoned, intellectually moribund" (Drennan 39). So what he wanted was a woman who was his intellectual equal, but also a muse and selfless helpmate. And, unbelievable though I frankly find it, Mamah Borthwick seems to have been exactly that. She was working on translating a Swedish feminist named Ellen Key in the last three years of her life, which gives us a clue about both her intellectual abilities and her philosophical position, but she also seems to have been perfectly content to abandon her own children and to let Wright install her at Taliesin, to be there whenever he wanted her but uncomplaining (as far as we know from Drennan) when he wasn't, even though her life cannot have been comfortable, given the reaction in Spring Green and surrounding communities to learning that Wright had built a house for his mistress in their midst.
Drennan analyzes what happened on the day of the murders (August 15, 1914) carefully and with an excellent eye for detail. It's odd that in every murder I've ever read about, there's always something that doesn't fit or can't be explained or doesn't seem to be possible. Either Julian Carlton was able to teleport, or he went without a pause from murdering Borthwick and her two children to serving soup to the six men who, in another moment, he would attempt to kill. He can't have followed the orthodox timeline of locking the six men in and setting the room on fire, then killing Borthwick and the children, then coming back to attack one of the men who had jumped out the window. As Drennan explains, the geography of Taliesin and the testimony of Herbert Fritz (one of the two survivors) make it physically impossible. But Drennan's alternate scenario requires, as he says, "a level of self-control in Carlton that is not so much inhuman as superhuman" (100). The facts we have can't be made into a story that makes sense. And yet it happened, whether we understand it or not. Seven people murdered and Taliesin burned (for the first time, but not the last).
Drennan is also very careful and thorough in his discussion of the murderer Julian Carlton, who had been hired as Taliesin's butler that summer. After he finished butchering his victims, he hid in the asbestos-lined furnace, and when he was discovered, he drank hydrochloric acid, presumably in the belief it would kill him quickly. It didn't. He lingered in miserable agony for seven and a half weeks before he died, unable either to breathe or eat through the acid-eaten tissues of his throat. Carlton did not explain his motive before his death, but Drennan makes some good speculations. What we know about him before he came to Taliesin tells us that he was paranoid and prone to fits of violent rage. His wife was terrified of him. He hated Taliesin (ironically, he and his wife had given their notice and August 15 was their last day of work), and he seems to have clashed more than once with the draftsmen who also lived at Taliesin. One of them called him a "black son of a bitch" three days before the murders (Carlton was of African or West Indian descent), and Carlton did tell the sheriff that in a later confrontation the same man struck him. Although Drennen doesn't quite go so far as to hypothesize explicitly that that man, Emil Brodelle, was Carlton's intended target and the rest of it--the murder of Borthwick and her children, the setting of the fire, the murder of the other draftsmen and workmen--was simply an effort not to leave any witnesses, he certainly lays all the pieces out for that speculation to be made. But whether it was that or something else, the crime was clearly disproportionate to the motive. John Cheney was 12; his sister Martha was 8. Whatever may have sparked Carlton's fury, there's no way to make their murders anything but psychotic rage.
The night after the murders, Frank Lloyd Wright buried Mamah Borthwick in the Unity Chapel cemetery. That sentence is literal. Although he had workmen dig her grave, he and he alone filled it in. He was buried next to her, according to his wishes, after his death in 1959. (He's not there any longer. When his third wife died in 1985, their daughter Iovanna had him exhumed, cremated, and interred with her mother's ashes in Arizona.)
But he refused to put a marker on her grave. "'All I had left to show for the strugle for freedom of the five years past that had swept most of my former life away, had now [itself] been swept away,' Wright said. 'Why mark the spot where desolation ended and began?'" (Drennan 156). He claimed that Taliesin II was a "'memory temple' . . . dedicated to Mamah Borthwick" (Drennan 125), but it isn't. Mamah Borthwick is a footnote and Taliesin is a shrine to the glory of Frank Lloyd Wright. He considered her death only as it affected him--and his grief was sincere and devastating, no doubt about that--and apparently there was no one to protest. Both her children were dead (not buried with her, though they died with her--their father had them cremated at Graceland Cemetery), her ex-husband was starting a family with his new wife, and whether her parents and two sisters were still alive or not, they seem to have lodged no comment of any kind. Borthwick's existence separate from Wright had been entirely expunged.
As an epigraph to his last, brief chapter--the history of Wright's life after Borthwick--Drennan quotes Ken Burns, "At some point, you have to forgive Frank Lloyd Wright for his excesses, his ego, his sensitivities, his horrible relations with his kids, and realize, on balance, that here was an extraordinary contribution to human history" (Burns qtd. in Drennan 154), and I'm sorry, but no you don't. Being a genius does not excuse anyone from the responsibility of being a decent human being. I agree that Wright was a genius and his influence on American art and architecture enormous, and I certainly don't think that we should go raze his buildilngs and ban his work from museums and libraries because he was a irresponsible narcissist. (Drennan's discussion of the Wright buildings that have been torn down, particularly the Imperial Hotel and the Midway Gardens, makes me want to cry.) But that doesn't mean we have to forgive him. We have to see him clearly.
If the living don't remember the dead, who will?
It's not clear when or how Mamah Borthwick's grave got its current marker. We don't know who felt strongly enough about her excision from history to make that very material protest. (John Ottenheimer, the man who designed and forcibly donated the second stone, said that in his seventeen years of residence at Taliesin, he never heard anyone mention her name. So much for the memory temple.) But someone did. That person--like John Ottenheimer, who is worried that the first stone is going to become illegible in another decade or so--is (or was) fighting uphill to remember the dead. And I feel strongly and irrationally that they are doing the right thing.
March 9, 2014
Follow up to Someone's Daughter (& parenthetically The Boy in the Box)
So, a couple years back, I read Silvia Pettem's
Someone's Daughter
, about an unidentified murder victim from 1954. As I was putting together my master list of book posts, I came across that discussion and remembered that someone had mentioned that Jane Doe had been positively identified. So I did a quick Google search, and sure enough, the same year that Someone's Daughter came out, with its theory that Jane Doe was a woman named Katharine Dyer, (a) Katharine Dyer was found living in Australia and (b) Jane Doe was identified, by DNA testing, as Dorothy Gay Howard. (The article has some quotes from Pettem that will demonstrate why I disliked her when I was reading her book.) The theory that Harvey Glatman was Jane Doe's murderer was apparently holding up, but, of course, it's a purely circumstantial case.
Given that I was just blogging about another unidentified victim and existential despair, it seemed a propos to remark that sometimes the Jane Does can be identified 50 years later. In one way, that doesn't matter at all, of course. She's still dead and there's no one to bring to justice. If she was murdered by Glatman, he was executed in 1959. If she wasn't murdered by Glatman, there's no telling who her murderer was and what became of him or her. But on the other hand, and in service of that quixotic streak I was talking about, it does matter. It matters enormously. Not to her, but to us. If the living don't remember the dead, who will?
Also, speaking of that question, If the living don't remember the dead, who will?,
papersky
wrote a poem.
Given that I was just blogging about another unidentified victim and existential despair, it seemed a propos to remark that sometimes the Jane Does can be identified 50 years later. In one way, that doesn't matter at all, of course. She's still dead and there's no one to bring to justice. If she was murdered by Glatman, he was executed in 1959. If she wasn't murdered by Glatman, there's no telling who her murderer was and what became of him or her. But on the other hand, and in service of that quixotic streak I was talking about, it does matter. It matters enormously. Not to her, but to us. If the living don't remember the dead, who will?
Also, speaking of that question, If the living don't remember the dead, who will?,
papersky
wrote a poem.
Unread Book Challenge: Master List
This is another entry mostly for me, but also for anyone who may find it useful. I find that I frequently want to refer back to previous book posts when discussing current reading, and it's getting very difficult to find the post I want because there are so many of them. So this is the master list of book posts. I will keep updating it as I read more books.
Caveat 1: Nonfiction only
Caveat 2: Books I did not actually finish are italicized.
LAST UPDATED: March 9, 2014
Albert, Alexa. Brothel: Mustang Ranch and its Women. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001.
Allert, Tillman. The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture. 2005. Transl. Jefferson Chase. New York: Picador-Henry Holt & Co., 2008.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 1963. 1965. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.
Ayçoberry, Pierre. The Social History of the Third Reich, 1933-1945. Transl. Janet Lloyd. New York: The New Press, 1999.
Baatz, Simon. For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.
Barra, Allen. Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends. 1998. Castle Books, 2005.
Bartov, Omer. Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Begg, Paul. Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History. 2003.
---. Jack the Ripper: The Facts. [Previously published as Jack the Ripper: The Uncensored Facts.] New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005.
Berkhoff, Karel C. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004.
Boessenecker, John. Badge and Buckshot: Lawlessness in Old California. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.
Bondeson, Jan. The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale. 2001. N.p.: Da Capo Press, 2002.
Bourke, Angela. The Burning of Bridget Cleary. 1999. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. 1974. New York: MJF Books, n.d.
Breslaw, Elaine G. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. New York: New York University Press, 1996.
Briggs, Robin. Witches & Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchhunts. New York: Viking-Penguin Books, 1996.
Brown, Arnold R. Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter. Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press, 1991.
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.
Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Kansas Charley: The True Story of a 19th-Century Boy Murderer. New York: Viking Books, 2003.
Brustein, William. The Logic of Evil: The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925-1933. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Bullock, Alan. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. Abridged edition. 1964. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.
Burrough, Bryan. Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
Butler, Anne M. Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West 1865-90. Urbana: Illini-University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Cohen, Patricia Cline. The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
Cohn, Norman. Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt. 1975. New York: Meridian-New American Library, 1977.
Collins, Paul. The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked The Tabloid Wars. New York: Crown Publishers, 2011.
Connell, Evan S. Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn. San Francisco, North Point Press, 1984.
Cowan, David, and John Kuenster. To Sleep with the Angels: The Story of a Fire. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks-Ivan R. Dee, 1996.
Craig, William. Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad. 1973. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Cullen, Tom. Crippen: The Mild Murderer. 1977. London: Penguin Books, 1988.
Davidson, James West. The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
De Voto, Bernard. The Year of Decision: 1846. 1942. Sentry Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, n.d.
Deakin, F. W. The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Italian Fascism. 1962. London: Phoenix Press, 2000.
DeArment, Robert K. Knights of the Green Cloth: The Saga of the Frontier Gamblers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.
Demos, John [Putnam]. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
---. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Douglas, John, and Mark Olshaker. The Cases That Haunt Us. New York: Lisa Drew-Scribner, 2000.
Duggan, Lisa. Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Evans, Richard J. Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. Basic Books-Perseus Books Group, 2001.
Evans, Stewart P., and Keith Skinner. Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell. Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2001.
Fatsis, Stefan. Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive SCRABBLE Players. New York: Penguin, 2002.
Flanders, Judith. The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. 2011. New York: Thomas Dunne Books-St. Martin's Press, 2013.
Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. 1964. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1995.
Fougera, Katherine Gibson. With Custer's Cavalry. 1942. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Fritzsche, Peter. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2008.
Furet, François, ed. Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews. [L'allemagne nazie et le génocide juif, 1985.] New York: Schocken Books, 1989.
Gardner, Mark Lee. To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West. New York: William Morrow-HarperCollins, 2010.
Glass, James M. "Life Unworthy of Life": Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in Hitler's Germany. N.p.: New Republic-Basic Books, 1997.
Godbeer, Richard. The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
---. Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. 1996. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Goodman, Jonathan. Murder on Several Occasions. Illus. Nina Lewis Smart. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2007.
Gragg, Larry. A Quest for Security: The Life of Samuel Parris, 1653-1720. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.
Griffiths, Arthur, Major. Mysteries of Police and Crime: Victorian Murderers. 1898. Stroud: The History Press, 2010.
Halttunen, Karen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: Mentor-New American Library, 1970.
Hawkins, Bruce R., and David B. Madsen. Excavation of the Donner-Reed Wagons: Historic Archaeology Along the Hastings Cutoff. 1990. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 1999.
Hill, Frances. A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997.
Hoyt, Edwin P. Hitler's War. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1988.
Jakubowski, Maxim, and Nathan Braund. The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper. 1999. 2nd ed. London: Robinson-Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2008.
James, P. D., and T. A. Critchley. The Maul and the Pear Tree. 1971. N.p.: Warner Books, 2002.
Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.
Kaplan, Louise J. The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet Thomas Chatterton. New York: Atheneum, 1988.
Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1987.
Kater, Michael H. Hitler Youth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris. 1998. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.
---. Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis. 2000. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
---. Kershaw, Ian. The 'Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
King, David. Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris. New York: Broadway Paperbacks-Random House, 2011.
Koch, H. W. Koch, H. W. The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 1922-1945. New York: Dorset Press, 1975.
---. Hitler Youth: The Duped Generation. Ballantine's Illustrated History of the Violent Century. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.
Kogon, Eugen. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them. [Der SS-Staat, 1946.] Transl. Heinz Norden. 1950. Introd. Nikolaus Wachsmann. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
Lambert, Angela. The Lost Life of Eva Braun. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006.
Liddell Hart, B. H. The German Generals Talk. 1948. New York: Quill 1979.
Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
Lincoln, Victoria. A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1967.
Lukacs, John. The Hitler of History. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.
Maddox, Brenda. Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats. 1999. New York: Perennial-HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.
Maechler, Stefan. The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth. [Includes the complete text of Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski. Transl. Carol Brown Janeway.] Transl. John E. Woods. New York: Schocken Books, 2001.
Maier, Charles S. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Maples, William R., Ph.D., and Michael Browning. Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist. New York: Doubleday, 1994.
Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser. New York: The Free Press-Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Mazower, Mark. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. 2008. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.
Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. 1988. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Merridale, Catherine. Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. New York: Picador-Henry Holt and Co., 2007.
Merritt, Greg. Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal that Changed Hollywood. Chicago: A Cappella-Chicago Review Press, 2013.
Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. 1944. Revised and expanded. New York: Harper Torchbooks-Harper & Row, 1966.
Nelson, Alan H. Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003.
Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Obeyeskere, Gananath. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
O'Brien, Geoffrey. The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2010.
Overy, Richard. Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945. New York: Viking-Penguin Books, 2001.
Parker, Peter. The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos. 1987. London: Hambledon Continuum, n.d.
Pawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984.
Pettem, Silvia. Someone's Daughter: In Search of Justice for Jane Doe. Lanham: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2009.
Read, Anthony. The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004.
Reitlinger, Gerald. The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945. 1956. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1981.
Roberts, Gary L. Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2006.
Roseman, Mark. The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Roughead, William. Classic Crimes. New York: New York Review Books, 2000.
Ruddick, James. Death at the Priory: Love, Sex, and Murder in Victorian England. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
Rumbelow, Donald. Jack the Ripper: The Complete Casebook. [Previously published as The Complete Jack the Ripper.] 1988. New York: Berkley Books, 1990.
Schneider, Paul. Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend. New York: John MacRae-Henry Holt and Co., 2009.
Segrè, Claudio G. Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Sereny, Gitta. Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill: The Story of Mary Bell. 1998. New York: Owl Books-Henry Holt & Co., 2000.
Sigmund, Anna Maria. Women of the Third Reich. [Die Frauen der Nazis]. 1998. Richmond Hill, Ontario: NDE Publishing, 2000.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, I-II. [Arkhipelag GULag.] Transl. Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973.
Srebnick, Amy Gilman. The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Stannard, David E. The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Stargardt, Nicholas. Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis. New York: Vintage Books: 2007.
Starkey, Marion L. The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. 1949. New York: Anchor Books-Doubleday, 1989.
Starr, Douglas. The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science. New York: Vintage Books-Random House, 2010.
Stashower, Daniel. The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder. New York: Berkley Books, 2006.
Stewart, George R. Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party. 1936. 2nd ed. 1960. Lincoln, NB: Bison-University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Stout, David. The Boy in the Box: The Unsolved Case of America's Unknown Child. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press-The Globe Pequot Press, 2008.
Sugden, Philip. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1994.
Sullivan, Robert. Goodbye Lizzie Borden. 1974. London: Penguin Books, 1989.
Summerscale, Kate. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective. New York: Walker & Co., 2008.
Swanson, James L. Manhunt: the 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer. New York: Harper Perennial: 2007.
Tefertiller, Casey. Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
Trow, M. J. The Many Faces of Jack the Ripper.
Tucher, Andie. Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America's First Mass Medium. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
van Pelt, Robert Jan. The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
Vicinus, Martha, ed. Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.
Vinogradov, V. K., Pogonyi, J. F., and N. V. Teptzov. Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB. London: Chaucer Press, 2005.
Waite, Robert G. L. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. 1977. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.
Wallis, Michael. Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.
Weiner, J. S. The Piltdown Forgery. 1953. Introd. Chris Stringer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Wistrich, Robert S. Hitler and the Holocaust: How and Why the Holocaust Happened. London: Phoenix Press, 2002.
Yoe, Craig. Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2009.
Zierold, Norman. Little Charley Ross: The Shocking Story of America's First Kidnapping for Ransom. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967.
Zwinger, Lynda. Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
Caveat 1: Nonfiction only
Caveat 2: Books I did not actually finish are italicized.
LAST UPDATED: March 9, 2014
Albert, Alexa. Brothel: Mustang Ranch and its Women. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001.
Allert, Tillman. The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture. 2005. Transl. Jefferson Chase. New York: Picador-Henry Holt & Co., 2008.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 1963. 1965. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.
Ayçoberry, Pierre. The Social History of the Third Reich, 1933-1945. Transl. Janet Lloyd. New York: The New Press, 1999.
Baatz, Simon. For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.
Barra, Allen. Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends. 1998. Castle Books, 2005.
Bartov, Omer. Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Begg, Paul. Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History. 2003.
---. Jack the Ripper: The Facts. [Previously published as Jack the Ripper: The Uncensored Facts.] New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005.
Berkhoff, Karel C. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004.
Boessenecker, John. Badge and Buckshot: Lawlessness in Old California. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.
Bondeson, Jan. The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale. 2001. N.p.: Da Capo Press, 2002.
Bourke, Angela. The Burning of Bridget Cleary. 1999. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. 1974. New York: MJF Books, n.d.
Breslaw, Elaine G. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. New York: New York University Press, 1996.
Briggs, Robin. Witches & Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchhunts. New York: Viking-Penguin Books, 1996.
Brown, Arnold R. Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter. Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press, 1991.
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.
Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Kansas Charley: The True Story of a 19th-Century Boy Murderer. New York: Viking Books, 2003.
Brustein, William. The Logic of Evil: The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925-1933. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Bullock, Alan. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. Abridged edition. 1964. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.
Burrough, Bryan. Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
Butler, Anne M. Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West 1865-90. Urbana: Illini-University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Cohen, Patricia Cline. The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
Cohn, Norman. Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt. 1975. New York: Meridian-New American Library, 1977.
Collins, Paul. The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked The Tabloid Wars. New York: Crown Publishers, 2011.
Connell, Evan S. Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn. San Francisco, North Point Press, 1984.
Cowan, David, and John Kuenster. To Sleep with the Angels: The Story of a Fire. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks-Ivan R. Dee, 1996.
Craig, William. Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad. 1973. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Cullen, Tom. Crippen: The Mild Murderer. 1977. London: Penguin Books, 1988.
Davidson, James West. The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
De Voto, Bernard. The Year of Decision: 1846. 1942. Sentry Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, n.d.
Deakin, F. W. The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Italian Fascism. 1962. London: Phoenix Press, 2000.
DeArment, Robert K. Knights of the Green Cloth: The Saga of the Frontier Gamblers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.
Demos, John [Putnam]. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
---. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Douglas, John, and Mark Olshaker. The Cases That Haunt Us. New York: Lisa Drew-Scribner, 2000.
Duggan, Lisa. Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Evans, Richard J. Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. Basic Books-Perseus Books Group, 2001.
Evans, Stewart P., and Keith Skinner. Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell. Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2001.
Fatsis, Stefan. Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive SCRABBLE Players. New York: Penguin, 2002.
Flanders, Judith. The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. 2011. New York: Thomas Dunne Books-St. Martin's Press, 2013.
Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. 1964. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1995.
Fougera, Katherine Gibson. With Custer's Cavalry. 1942. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Fritzsche, Peter. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2008.
Furet, François, ed. Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews. [L'allemagne nazie et le génocide juif, 1985.] New York: Schocken Books, 1989.
Gardner, Mark Lee. To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West. New York: William Morrow-HarperCollins, 2010.
Glass, James M. "Life Unworthy of Life": Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in Hitler's Germany. N.p.: New Republic-Basic Books, 1997.
Godbeer, Richard. The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
---. Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. 1996. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Goodman, Jonathan. Murder on Several Occasions. Illus. Nina Lewis Smart. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2007.
Gragg, Larry. A Quest for Security: The Life of Samuel Parris, 1653-1720. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.
Griffiths, Arthur, Major. Mysteries of Police and Crime: Victorian Murderers. 1898. Stroud: The History Press, 2010.
Halttunen, Karen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: Mentor-New American Library, 1970.
Hawkins, Bruce R., and David B. Madsen. Excavation of the Donner-Reed Wagons: Historic Archaeology Along the Hastings Cutoff. 1990. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 1999.
Hill, Frances. A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997.
Hoyt, Edwin P. Hitler's War. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1988.
Jakubowski, Maxim, and Nathan Braund. The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper. 1999. 2nd ed. London: Robinson-Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2008.
James, P. D., and T. A. Critchley. The Maul and the Pear Tree. 1971. N.p.: Warner Books, 2002.
Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.
Kaplan, Louise J. The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet Thomas Chatterton. New York: Atheneum, 1988.
Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1987.
Kater, Michael H. Hitler Youth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris. 1998. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.
---. Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis. 2000. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
---. Kershaw, Ian. The 'Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
King, David. Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris. New York: Broadway Paperbacks-Random House, 2011.
Koch, H. W. Koch, H. W. The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development 1922-1945. New York: Dorset Press, 1975.
---. Hitler Youth: The Duped Generation. Ballantine's Illustrated History of the Violent Century. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.
Kogon, Eugen. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them. [Der SS-Staat, 1946.] Transl. Heinz Norden. 1950. Introd. Nikolaus Wachsmann. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
Lambert, Angela. The Lost Life of Eva Braun. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006.
Liddell Hart, B. H. The German Generals Talk. 1948. New York: Quill 1979.
Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
Lincoln, Victoria. A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1967.
Lukacs, John. The Hitler of History. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.
Maddox, Brenda. Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats. 1999. New York: Perennial-HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.
Maechler, Stefan. The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth. [Includes the complete text of Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski. Transl. Carol Brown Janeway.] Transl. John E. Woods. New York: Schocken Books, 2001.
Maier, Charles S. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Maples, William R., Ph.D., and Michael Browning. Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist. New York: Doubleday, 1994.
Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser. New York: The Free Press-Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Mazower, Mark. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. 2008. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.
Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. 1988. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Merridale, Catherine. Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. New York: Picador-Henry Holt and Co., 2007.
Merritt, Greg. Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal that Changed Hollywood. Chicago: A Cappella-Chicago Review Press, 2013.
Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. 1944. Revised and expanded. New York: Harper Torchbooks-Harper & Row, 1966.
Nelson, Alan H. Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003.
Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Obeyeskere, Gananath. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
O'Brien, Geoffrey. The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2010.
Overy, Richard. Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945. New York: Viking-Penguin Books, 2001.
Parker, Peter. The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos. 1987. London: Hambledon Continuum, n.d.
Pawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984.
Pettem, Silvia. Someone's Daughter: In Search of Justice for Jane Doe. Lanham: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2009.
Read, Anthony. The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004.
Reitlinger, Gerald. The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945. 1956. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1981.
Roberts, Gary L. Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2006.
Roseman, Mark. The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Roughead, William. Classic Crimes. New York: New York Review Books, 2000.
Ruddick, James. Death at the Priory: Love, Sex, and Murder in Victorian England. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
Rumbelow, Donald. Jack the Ripper: The Complete Casebook. [Previously published as The Complete Jack the Ripper.] 1988. New York: Berkley Books, 1990.
Schneider, Paul. Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend. New York: John MacRae-Henry Holt and Co., 2009.
Segrè, Claudio G. Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Sereny, Gitta. Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill: The Story of Mary Bell. 1998. New York: Owl Books-Henry Holt & Co., 2000.
Sigmund, Anna Maria. Women of the Third Reich. [Die Frauen der Nazis]. 1998. Richmond Hill, Ontario: NDE Publishing, 2000.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, I-II. [Arkhipelag GULag.] Transl. Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973.
Srebnick, Amy Gilman. The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Stannard, David E. The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Stargardt, Nicholas. Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis. New York: Vintage Books: 2007.
Starkey, Marion L. The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. 1949. New York: Anchor Books-Doubleday, 1989.
Starr, Douglas. The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science. New York: Vintage Books-Random House, 2010.
Stashower, Daniel. The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder. New York: Berkley Books, 2006.
Stewart, George R. Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party. 1936. 2nd ed. 1960. Lincoln, NB: Bison-University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Stout, David. The Boy in the Box: The Unsolved Case of America's Unknown Child. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press-The Globe Pequot Press, 2008.
Sugden, Philip. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1994.
Sullivan, Robert. Goodbye Lizzie Borden. 1974. London: Penguin Books, 1989.
Summerscale, Kate. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective. New York: Walker & Co., 2008.
Swanson, James L. Manhunt: the 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer. New York: Harper Perennial: 2007.
Tefertiller, Casey. Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
Trow, M. J. The Many Faces of Jack the Ripper.
Tucher, Andie. Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America's First Mass Medium. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
van Pelt, Robert Jan. The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
Vicinus, Martha, ed. Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.
Vinogradov, V. K., Pogonyi, J. F., and N. V. Teptzov. Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB. London: Chaucer Press, 2005.
Waite, Robert G. L. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. 1977. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.
Wallis, Michael. Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.
Weiner, J. S. The Piltdown Forgery. 1953. Introd. Chris Stringer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Wistrich, Robert S. Hitler and the Holocaust: How and Why the Holocaust Happened. London: Phoenix Press, 2002.
Yoe, Craig. Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2009.
Zierold, Norman. Little Charley Ross: The Shocking Story of America's First Kidnapping for Ransom. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967.
Zwinger, Lynda. Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
March 6, 2014
UBC: Stout
Stout, David. The Boy in the Box: The Unsolved Case of America's Unknown Child. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press-The Globe Pequot Press, 2008.
The Boy in the Box (later pretentiously renamed America's Unknown Child) was a child, somewhere between four and six years old, found in a cardboard box in Philadelphia in February 1957. He had been beaten to death. Despite what seemed like any number of promising clues, including surgical scars, he has, to this day, not been positively identified, and at this point, every passing day makes it more likely that the person or persons who could have identified him are dead themselves.
(I have had this sentence running through my head for a couple days now: If the living don't remember the dead, who will? It seems to be some sort of morbid koan, since it is the most utterly rhetorical of rhetorical questions and yet won't leave me alone.)
This is the book Somebody's Daughter wanted to be. Stout is telling the story of the Boy in the Box and of the investigators who kept searching for answers for fifty years, and he's also telling the story of how, over those same fifty years, cases like Bobby Greenlease, Steven Damman, Adam Walsh, Mary Beth Tinning, Stephen Van Der Sluys, Waneta Hoyt, Marie Noe, Little Miss 1565, Jerell Willis (the Boy in the Bag), Angelica Evergreen, and Riley Ann Sawyers (Baby Grace), were changing societal awareness of the vulnerability of small children--particularly their vulnerability at the hands of their caregivers. And, of course, the terrible threnody of the children who are lost and never found, like Steven Damman, and the children who are found and never identified, like the Boy in the Box.
There is a vein of sentimentality in Stout, toward both the Boy in the Box and toward the investigators, and while it's understandable, I find it cloying and distracting. But, obviously, this is a fast and gripping read (I started it over dinner last night and finished it before I went to bed), and Stout does an excellent job of telling the story of an unsuccessful investigation and all the competing narratives it spawns.
This is a sad book in many ways--none of these children can be saved, and the investigators' persistence (and sometimes obsession) is not rewarded. But it is also a hopeful book, because for every Mary Beth Tinning and Stephen Van Der Sluys, there is someone who is trying to make things better, to find answers, to bring Waneta Hoyt and Marie Noe to justice. And ultimately, this is the story of people (including Stout himself) who are insisting on REMEMBERING the Boy in the Box, who care even though they have no reason to. It's this quixotic streak that balances the terrible savagery in human nature, and Stout does a remarkably good job of encompassing both.
The Boy in the Box (later pretentiously renamed America's Unknown Child) was a child, somewhere between four and six years old, found in a cardboard box in Philadelphia in February 1957. He had been beaten to death. Despite what seemed like any number of promising clues, including surgical scars, he has, to this day, not been positively identified, and at this point, every passing day makes it more likely that the person or persons who could have identified him are dead themselves.
(I have had this sentence running through my head for a couple days now: If the living don't remember the dead, who will? It seems to be some sort of morbid koan, since it is the most utterly rhetorical of rhetorical questions and yet won't leave me alone.)
This is the book Somebody's Daughter wanted to be. Stout is telling the story of the Boy in the Box and of the investigators who kept searching for answers for fifty years, and he's also telling the story of how, over those same fifty years, cases like Bobby Greenlease, Steven Damman, Adam Walsh, Mary Beth Tinning, Stephen Van Der Sluys, Waneta Hoyt, Marie Noe, Little Miss 1565, Jerell Willis (the Boy in the Bag), Angelica Evergreen, and Riley Ann Sawyers (Baby Grace), were changing societal awareness of the vulnerability of small children--particularly their vulnerability at the hands of their caregivers. And, of course, the terrible threnody of the children who are lost and never found, like Steven Damman, and the children who are found and never identified, like the Boy in the Box.
There is a vein of sentimentality in Stout, toward both the Boy in the Box and toward the investigators, and while it's understandable, I find it cloying and distracting. But, obviously, this is a fast and gripping read (I started it over dinner last night and finished it before I went to bed), and Stout does an excellent job of telling the story of an unsuccessful investigation and all the competing narratives it spawns.
This is a sad book in many ways--none of these children can be saved, and the investigators' persistence (and sometimes obsession) is not rewarded. But it is also a hopeful book, because for every Mary Beth Tinning and Stephen Van Der Sluys, there is someone who is trying to make things better, to find answers, to bring Waneta Hoyt and Marie Noe to justice. And ultimately, this is the story of people (including Stout himself) who are insisting on REMEMBERING the Boy in the Box, who care even though they have no reason to. It's this quixotic streak that balances the terrible savagery in human nature, and Stout does a remarkably good job of encompassing both.
March 5, 2014
UBC: Cowan & Kuenster
Cowan, David, and John Kuenster. To Sleep with the Angels: The Story of a Fire. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks-Ivan R. Dee, 1996.
The fire at Our Lady of Angels School on December 1, 1958, killed 92 children and 3 nuns, caused radical changes in the fire codes for schools, and remains unsolved. Cowan & Kuenster describe the course of the disaster, the horrible aftermath, and the efforts of the investigators (sometimes against pushback from the Catholic Church) to find the person responsible. There have been two confessions, both later recanted, and no way now, in all likelihood, that the mystery will ever be definitively solved.
There are any number of horrible things about this fire, beyond the fact that it happened at all: the fact that many of the victims probably died because, even though they were aware the school was on fire, school policy was that they could not leave their classrooms unless the fire alarm rang and the fire alarm (which had to be manually triggered) failed to ring until it was too late; the fact that the only fire escape was LOCKED (and even when it was unlocked, it was in the back of the smallest of the classrooms and thus in practice only available to the children in that room); the fact that after the fire, the surviving children were told that the ones who died were the good ones, and that's why God took them; the inevitable way in which the legacy of stricter, safer fire codes was undercut and subverted by human greed and laziness. But the thing that terrified me the most was how fast it happened. (Not that this is surprising--it's no secret that fire moves fast--but this book, like Young Men and Fire, lays out that speed so that you can look at it and understand what it means.) It's not entirely clear when the fire started, or when it was first noticed, but the first call to the Fire Department was received at 2:42, the first fire trucks arrived at 2:44, and although Cowan and Kuenster's timeline is not precise, my guess is that by 2:50, seven minutes before it was declared a five-alarm fire, it was already too late. Everyone who was going to make it out of the school already had, and everyone who hadn't was already dead (and some of those who made it out were dying--the last death from the fire was in August 1959).
This is, in fact, a very good book. Cowan & Kuenster tell the story clearly and with sympathy for both victims and survivors. They fall back on clichés occasionally, but their subject is one that pushes constantly toward the boundaries of the literally undescribable, and I commend them for writing about it as well as they do.
There is a website devoted to the fire, if you're looking for more information.
The fire at Our Lady of Angels School on December 1, 1958, killed 92 children and 3 nuns, caused radical changes in the fire codes for schools, and remains unsolved. Cowan & Kuenster describe the course of the disaster, the horrible aftermath, and the efforts of the investigators (sometimes against pushback from the Catholic Church) to find the person responsible. There have been two confessions, both later recanted, and no way now, in all likelihood, that the mystery will ever be definitively solved.
There are any number of horrible things about this fire, beyond the fact that it happened at all: the fact that many of the victims probably died because, even though they were aware the school was on fire, school policy was that they could not leave their classrooms unless the fire alarm rang and the fire alarm (which had to be manually triggered) failed to ring until it was too late; the fact that the only fire escape was LOCKED (and even when it was unlocked, it was in the back of the smallest of the classrooms and thus in practice only available to the children in that room); the fact that after the fire, the surviving children were told that the ones who died were the good ones, and that's why God took them; the inevitable way in which the legacy of stricter, safer fire codes was undercut and subverted by human greed and laziness. But the thing that terrified me the most was how fast it happened. (Not that this is surprising--it's no secret that fire moves fast--but this book, like Young Men and Fire, lays out that speed so that you can look at it and understand what it means.) It's not entirely clear when the fire started, or when it was first noticed, but the first call to the Fire Department was received at 2:42, the first fire trucks arrived at 2:44, and although Cowan and Kuenster's timeline is not precise, my guess is that by 2:50, seven minutes before it was declared a five-alarm fire, it was already too late. Everyone who was going to make it out of the school already had, and everyone who hadn't was already dead (and some of those who made it out were dying--the last death from the fire was in August 1959).
This is, in fact, a very good book. Cowan & Kuenster tell the story clearly and with sympathy for both victims and survivors. They fall back on clichés occasionally, but their subject is one that pushes constantly toward the boundaries of the literally undescribable, and I commend them for writing about it as well as they do.
There is a website devoted to the fire, if you're looking for more information.
