Sarah Monette's Blog, page 9

Celebrating North Tonawanda Carrousel Animals 1883-1959

Celebrating North Tonawanda Carrousel Animals 1883-1959 by Elizabeth M. Brick

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


As Abraham Lincoln said, If you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you'll like. I love carousels and carousel horses, so this exhibition catalogue with its excellent photography was exactly the kind of thing I like. If you, Gentle Reader, also love carousels, I highly recommend a visit to the Herschell Carrousel Factory Museum in North Tonawanda, New York (website).



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UBC: Maclean, Fire on the Mountain

Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire by John N. Maclean

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The fire on Storm King Mountain in July 1994 (which has gone down to posterity as the South Canyon Fire due to a mistake that feels--with the perfect vision of hindsight--like an omen of all the snowballing mistakes to come) was a clusterfuck of epic proportions. It is also eerily similar to the Mann Gulch fire of 1949 (written about so brilliantly by John Maclean's father Norman Maclean in Young Men and Fire that I have never yet managed to write anything coherent about why I think it is the best American nonfiction book of the twentieth century). John Maclean makes those parallels explicit.

Fire on the Mountain and Young Men and Fire are very different books, writing about the same tragedy happening for different reasons: the Mann Gulch fire killed thirteen smoke-jumpers because nobody knew the warning signs of a blow-up to watch for; the South Canyon fire killed fourteen firefighters (three smoke-jumpers, two helitacks, and nine hotshots), not because nobody knew the signs (Mann Gulch and tragedies like it had taught them those), but because (1) the topography of Storm King Mountain was such that the firefighters couldn't see what the fire was doing; (2) the fire was so mismanaged that the people on the ground were working without the information that might have saved them, the information that would have told them they needed to be watching for a blow-up, and (3) authority, decision-making, and actual knowledge of the fire were separated out in very bad ways. What both tragedies share, aside from the fluke of topography that made them split-second deadly, is critical underestimation of the fire's danger by everyone involved, firefighters on the ground as much as the people sending them out there.

Maclean père's book is about trying to figure out what happened in Mann Gulch, both what people did and why and what the fire did and why. Fire on the Mountain is much more an attempt simply to drag all the pieces of the story out where they can be seen. I do not for an instant think that Maclean fils had an easier job: the overlapping of jurisdictions, authority, and responsibilities between the BLM and the Western Slope Coordination Center never did entirely make sense to me, and it only got worse the more agencies and organizations got involved. It's also very difficult to describe topography in prose. It took me several times through Young Men and Fire before I got a grip on the physical attributes of Mann Gulch, and insofar as I understand Storm King Mountain, it's because I already have at least a rough understanding of Mann Gulch.

This is John Maclean's first book (if I've got his bibliography right), and it shows. He doesn't have the command over his narrative that he demonstrates in The Esperanza Fire: Arson, Murder, and the Agony of Engine 57; there's less clarity, less control. But it's still very good.



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UBC: Maclean: Fire on the Mountain

Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire by John N. Maclean

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The fire on Storm King Mountain in July 1994 (which has gone down to posterity as the South Canyon Fire due to a mistake that feels--with the perfect vision of hindsight--like an omen of all the snowballing mistakes to come) was a clusterfuck of epic proportions. It is also eerily similar to the Mann Gulch fire of 1949 (written about so brilliantly by John Maclean's father Norman Maclean in Young Men and Fire that I have never yet managed to write anything coherent about why I think it is the best American nonfiction book of the twentieth century). John Maclean makes those parallels explicit.

Fire on the Mountain and Young Men and Fire are very different books, writing about the same tragedy happening for different reasons: the Mann Gulch fire killed thirteen smoke-jumpers because nobody knew the warning signs of a blow-up to watch for; the South Canyon fire killed fourteen firefighters (three smoke-jumpers, two helitacks, and nine hotshots), not because nobody knew the signs (Mann Gulch and tragedies like it had taught them those), but because (1) the topography of Storm King Mountain was such that the firefighters couldn't see what the fire was doing; (2) the fire was so mismanaged that the people on the ground were working without the information that might have saved them, the information that would have told them they needed to be watching for a blow-up, and (3) authority, decision-making, and actual knowledge of the fire were separated out in very bad ways. What both tragedies share, aside from the fluke of topography that made them split-second deadly, is critical underestimation of the fire's danger by everyone involved, firefighters on the ground as much as the people sending them out there.

Maclean père's book is about trying to figure out what happened in Mann Gulch, both what people did and why and what the fire did and why. Fire on the Mountain is much more an attempt simply to drag all the pieces of the story out where they can be seen. I do not for an instant think that Maclean fils had an easier job: the overlapping of jurisdictions, authority, and responsibilities between the BLM and the Western Slope Coordination Center never did entirely make sense to me, and it only got worse the more agencies and organizations got involved. It's also very difficult to describe topography in prose. It took me several times through Young Men and Fire before I got a grip on the physical attributes of Mann Gulch, and insofar as I understand Storm King Mountain, it's because I already have at least a rough understanding of Mann Gulch.

This is John Maclean's first book (if I've got his bibliography right), and it shows. He doesn't have the command over his narrative that he demonstrates in The Esperanza Fire: Arson, Murder, and the Agony of Engine 57; there's less clarity, less control. But it's still very good.



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UBC: Rule, The End of the Dream: The Golden Boy Who Never Grew Up, and Other True Cases

The End of the Dream: The Golden Boy Who Never Grew Up by Ann Rule

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The End of the Dream: Scott Scurlock (aka Hollywood), bank robber, Seattle 1992-1996
"The Peeping Tom": the murder of Kay Owens, Salem OR, 1971
The Girl Who Fell in Love with her Killer": Granite Falls WA, 1973 ("Barbie Linley," 15, was raped, shot three times in the head, and left for dead in a ditch. By some terrible miracle she survived . . . only to fall in love with and marry her rapist/nearly-murderer before his trial.)
"An Unlikely Suspect": King County WA, 1974 (the murder of "Vera English" by her 14 year old stepson)

Scott Scurlock is also the subject of an episode of The FBI Files , which I watched yesterday. Because I'm interested in storytelling, it was fascinating for me to watch the very different ways this story was presented. The FBI Files is, of course, all about the investigators and the investigation; Rule, although also interested in the investigators and the investigation (it was honestly awesome to be able to watch her protagonists being interviewed, to fit their voices and faces together with her descriptions), gives equal focus, and considerably more words, to the bizarre career of Scott Scurlock, from mildly wild boy in Virginia, to beach bum in Hawaii, to methamphetamine chemist in Washington State, to bank robber. (For some reason, The FBI Files describes him as a local actor, which he was not--or, at least, not in any legitimate sense.) Along the way, he built (or had his friends build for him) the "biggest treehouse in the world." Rule emphasizes the way that Scurlock used and discarded friends and lovers alike, and the way he absolutely destroyed the lives of his two accomplices, Mark Biggins and Steve Meyers. (Steve Meyers' brother, artist Robert Meyers, clearly gave generous interviews.) The FBI Files doesn't really care why Scurlock did what he did. Rule does, and she does her best to diagram out the reconstructed thought processes of someone who ticks off a bunch of items on the Hi! I am a Sociopath! list.

The shorter pieces in this book show how hard true crime writing actually is; the less space you have, the less you can create narrative tension, the less your story has any sense of payoff. And I don't mean that in a "good triumphs over evil" way, but simply structurally. The stories are all kind of flat, even when the events themselves are almost unbelievable. (A fourteen-year-old boy, wanted for murder, driving his victim's car, making it all the way from Washington State to Florida? A fifteen-year-old girl surviving being shot in the head three times, and then marrying the guy who shot and raped her?) This may be where being a gifted prose stylist can be your saving grace. Rule is a good and compelling writer, but she doesn't have the élan to her writing that William Roughead does, or Jonathan Goodman when he's on a roll. (Goodman is evidence that one can also have too much style to one's prose, but that's a different problem.) I'll reread Roughead, and Goodman's better pieces, simply for the pleasure of reading them, and that's not something I can say about Rule.



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UBC: Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I admit I have a blind prejudice against Ann Rule, because she is (1) prolific, (2) wildly popular, (3) published in paperbacks that look like the epitome of trashy true crime.

Now, I know better than all of this. I know prolific is no barometer of quality, I know popularity is likewise charted on a completely different axis, and holy freaking Jesus do I know that how a book is packaged has nothing whatsoever to do with the book itself. But of course that's how prejudice works; it's something that's wormed its way down past the rational intellect into the cognitive reflexes. You call yourself on it even as you think it, but you can't stop yourself thinking it in the first place.

It's very annoying.

I am trying to educate myself about true crime writing, having recognized thanks to reading William Roughead that it is a genre in nonfiction that gets denigrated much the way "genre fiction" does as "trashy" and "popular." It even has its token ambassadors to "serious literature" (e.g., Truman Capote) just as science fiction does, authors who are always cited as being brilliant despite the genre they work in. (Newsflash: if a writer is brilliant it is never despite working in a declassé genre. It is because they are working in a genre they love and value.)

So I've started trolling the used bookstores for classics. William Roughead and F. Tennyson Jesse and their colleagues are, sadly, beyond the resources of a casual search, but I've added to Donald Rumbelow and Victoria Lincoln, Jack Olson and Vincent Bugliosi and now Ann Rule.

Ann Rule is an incredibly compelling writer. I bought The Stranger Beside Me Friday afternoon and I finished it this morning (Sunday), despite the fact that it is 625 pages long, counting the Afterword (1986), The Last Chapter (1989), Update--20 Years Later (2000), and The Final Chapter? (2008). Ann Rule died last year, or I imagine the poor woman would still be adding to The Stranger Beside Me, still trying to convince young women that predators like Ted Bundy are NOT charming, NOT sexy, NOT romantic. They cannot be "saved" or "reformed" because what makes them kill is not something they can--or want--to control. I love the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast, but I think it is an incredibly dangerous paradigm because it teaches girls that beasts can be tamed. And there are some beasts that can't.

Rule's story is as much about Ted Bundy's long drawn-out fight with the legal system as it is about his murders (and that long-running brawl through the Florida court system actually catches Bundy the monster in the spotlight more than once), and always the motif running, sometimes loud, sometimes soft, of her fight to understand how a man she considered a close friend could be the monster he so clearly was. She is extremely honest and open about her own ambivalence and about the way Bundy manipulated her; she includes extracts from his letters to her where you can see it happening. You can see the way he understands that if he pushes this button, he gets that response. And you can see the way--as you could see with Jesse Pomeroy in The Wilderness of Ruin: A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America's Youngest Serial Killer--that he can't grasp the fact that the button won't always work. He can't grasp the idea that Rule--or anyone else--might be able to see what he's trying to do or that the efficacy of the button is dependent upon how Bundy himself is perceived. When he writes to her accusing her of exploiting him, she says:

Curiously, my immediate reaction was one of guilt. Emotion without rationale: What have I done to this poor man? And then I remembered that I had never once lied to Ted. I had my book contract months before he was a suspect, I told him about it when he became a suspect, and I reiterated the details of my contract to him many times in letters. [...] I believe that Ted felt that I could be manipulated into writing the definitive "Ted Bundy is innocent" book. [...] But the Miami trial had exposed his guilt with such merciless clarity. I had written what I had to write. Now, he was furious with me [...] That he had lied to me--probably from the first moment I met him--had not occurred to him. [...] then--for the very first time--I truly realized that he could not, would not, understand or emphathize [sic] or even care what my situation was. I had been meant to serve a purpose in his life; I had been the designated Bundy PR person--and I had failed to produce.
(520-21)

Bundy knew how to manipulate and--as his work with Rule at the Crisis Center where they first met demonstrates--he knew how to mimic compassion and empathy. And for some reason, for some part of his life, he got some sort of satisfaction out of doing so. (The fact that, when he first knew her, Bundy gave Rule some very insightful and helpful relationship advice will NEVER not be one of the creepiest things about him.) But he got more satisfaction, and something that was in some way deeply necessary to him, out of abducting, bludgeoning, strangling, raping . . . murdering young women who ticked off some critical number of attributes on an internal list.

This is an excellent book: readable, thoughtful, an honest depiction of the effect a serial murderer has, not only, most cruelly and obviously, on his victims and their families, but on law enforcement personnel, and on the murderer's own friends and family. (I am deliberately not using the term "loved ones.") And one of the saddest and most chilling parts of the whole doorstop book is in the afterwords and "final" chapters as Rule tries to sort through the women and girls who might have been killed by Ted Bundy--both the women who contact her because they think they encountered Bundy and escaped and the girls and women who are unsolved murders, unsolved missing persons, but whose cases fit Bundy's M.O. or who fit what investigators have been able to piece together of his timeline.

Or the murder he confessed to just before his execution in 1989, of a girl in Idaho who was apparently never reported missing and whose body has apparently never been found.

I watch the true crime shows I can find on Hulu. They occasionally do episodes with true crime writers, and the writers very rarely come off well. They tend to present as egotists or vultures or both, and I cringe for them, because I know that for 90% of them, that's not true. (I will not name names, because that's mean.) But Ann Rule didn't ( The New Detectives 3.1). She came across as an intelligent woman who was still struggling to understand something that no one fully understands and as someone who was trying to use her writing and her experience, and the social capital she'd accumulated, to advocate for victims and survivors and to try to educate people, especially women, so that they would not become victims themselves.

So, prolific? Yes. Popular? Yes. Trashy? No. Not at all.



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This. This is how much of a dork I am.

I have drawn a map (in MS Paint) of Fox's theory about what happened to Custer's battalion.




HIGHLY SCHEMATIC, but it did help me visualize what was going on.

UBC: Fox, Archaeology, History, and Custer's Last Battle

Archaeology, History, and Custer’s Last Battle: The Little Big Horn Reexamined by Richard A. Fox

My rating: 5 of 5 stars




This is an excellent book. It has a few flaws, most notably, Fox's writing style, which suffers vilely from the almost-right-word, and of course it's more than twenty years old, so for all I know it's been completely discredited.

I hope not, because Fox presents a clear, rational, and extensively substantiated argument about what happened in the Battle of the Little Bighorn and why Custer lost.

This book is also an excellent complement to Custer's Last Campaign: Mitch Boyer and the Little Bighorn Reconstructed. Where Gray takes you through the campaign leading up to the battle, Fox uses archaeology, specifically an analysis of bullets and shell casings found, plus a consideration of the US Cavalry's tactical manual (Cavalry Tactics, United States Army (1874)), the testimony of white eyewitnesses, and the testimony of Native American participants and observers, to take you through the battle. (He calls Gray out specifically on his failure to use Native American testimony to reconstruct the battle; I think Gray is very good at using Native American testimony when he can figure out how to measure time from white testimony, but without that yardstick, he doesn't seem to know how to proceed.)

Fox argues that Custer's battalion (Cos. C, E, F, I, and L, plus HQ staff, plus scouts and civilians) was on the offensive as it headed into Medicine Tail Coulee (the last time the battalion was seen alive by white men). Custer's orders were less about fighting the Sioux and Cheyenne and more about rounding them up and returning them to the reservations, so (Fox argues) when the battalion reached eyeshot of the village and saw that the women and children were fleeing west and north, he didn't attack, but pursued. The warriors were mostly off fighting Reno to the south, so Cos. C, I, and L staked out Calhoun Hill while Cos. E, F, and the HQ staff went north and west, looking for a good place to cross the river in pursuit.

What happened then is basically a demonstration of why guerillas can hold out against traditional armies for much longer than seems at all likely. Cos. C, I, and L stood still, L Co. defending against the known but not serious threat to their immediate south, while the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors infiltrated the coulees and ridges around them. When the soldiers realized that warriors had gotten uncomfortably close to the west, C Co. charged them, and that's where the whole thing starts to fall apart.

Fox is using a combat model he calls stability/disintegration, and he points out a number of factors that made Custer's battalion ripe for disintegration. The final straw was the fact that there were a lot more Native American warriors a lost closer than C Co. was prepared for. The company disintegrated and fell back to Calhoun Hill, at which point some officer (who was not Custer, since Custer was off northwest on Custer Hill looking for the women & children to capture) made a serious tactical blunder. He swung L Co. from holding a defensive line against the south to holding a defensive line against the west--while the threat from the south remained unresolved. (And it wasn't like there wasn't a whole third company, I Co., that could have been deployed.) L Co., under fire from both front and left flank, and with C Co. already panicked, themselves panicked in turn, and the panic spread like a fire. All three companies fled north, putting up little to no resistance against the Native Americans who were quick to close in. Fox's research suggests that very few of them made it to Custer Hill.

At Custer Hill, E and F Cos. scrambled back to defend, but they were already off balance, and they had (maybe 20) panicked survivors of the right wing of their battalion rushing up on them, and more and more Sioux and Cheyenne were being drawn away from Reno to attack Custer. The soldiers bunched up (which Fox says is the most natural and most fatal of reactions when tactical stability starts to disintegrate) and died. The last few survivors made a desperate flight west (trying to reach the river?) but were trapped in the aptly named Deep Ravine and killed.

The whole thing took less than two hours.

The book began as Fox's Ph.D. dissertation, and you can see the long cold fingers of his thesis committee in the attempts to "make a wider argument" and "explain why archaeology matters." Ignoring those bits will do you no harm, and otherwise this book provided more answers to the why and how of Little Bighorn than I thought I'd ever have.





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Conversations at 5:30

UNDERFOOT CAT: OH THANK GOD YOU'RE FINALLY UP.
ME: Good morning to you, too.
CATZILA: we are perishing of starvation
UNDERFOOT CAT: PERISHING UTTERLY.
ME: It's 5:30 in the morning. You have never once in your entire spoiled-rotten little lives been fed at 5:30 in the morning.
UNDERFOOT CAT: I'm sorry, did you not hear me? PERISHING. UTTERLY.
CATZILLA: besides it's lunch-time in Paris
ME: . . . Paris, France?
CATZILLA: le chat est adorable
UNDERFOOT CAT: Q.E.D., dude. Where's our breakfast?

Speaking of the Little Bighorn

PURELY BY SERENDIPITY, I happened to pick up a National Geographic in the doctor's office this morning and found this. It is deeply surreal in its own right, but even more so for me because Brigadier General Edward S. Godfrey (a lieutenant in 1876) is notable as a reliable diarist/witness; he's someone I know well enough, historically speaking, to have an opinion about. (He falls into the category of men honorably trying to do their duty to the best of their abilities, and is also notable as being an officer at/near/around the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, who actually kept his head.)

I wish they had identifications for any of the Native American men.

UBC: Gray, Custer's Last Campaign

Custer's Last Campaign: Mitch Boyer and the Little Bighorn Reconstructed by John Stephens Gray

My rating: 3 of 5 stars




Part of this book is fascinating, but "part," unfortunately, does not equal "all." Gray's writing style is clear and competent (it has to be, because I was able to follow his reconstruction of Custer's campaign), but not engaging, and he makes the mistake that so many nonfiction writers do of putting the explicit articulation of his argument at the end of his book instead of at the beginning. I would have found the biography of Mitch Boyer much more interesting if I'd known what I was reading it for.

So. Gray's purpose in writing this book is to do a time-motion study of Custer's 1876 campaign, especially the battle(s) at Reno Hill and what is now the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. His theses are:

(1) a defense, in general, of the accuracy and reliability of Native American witnesses to the battle, especially the Crow scout Curley who was the last person in Custer's company to leave the Little Bighorn alive, and a repudiation in particular of the accounts of the battle and campaign that make Curley out to be a liar and/or a coward.

(2) a defense, a eulogy, and a championing of Mitch Boyer, the half-Sioux half-French scout. (Mitch is an Anglicization of Mich', being short for Michel, and Boyer is only one of many possible spellings of his surname. I'm sticking with Boyer because that's how Gray spells it, but if you want to learn more about him, Bouyer will get you the Mitch you're looking for from Google.) Gray is especially concerned (he reveals at the end) to refute the rumors and speculation that Boyer betrayed Custer to the Sioux.

(3) a refutation of the persistent rumor that there were 20 to 40 bodies lost. He does patient, careful math and proves that, no, the Seventh Cavalry can all be accounted for, alive or dead. His margin of error is +/- 1, not +/-20.

He also along the way demonstrates that the unreliable witnesses to the Little Bighorn are the commissioned officers of the Seventh Cavalry, especially Major Marcus Reno and MOST ESPECIALLY Captain Frederick Benteen, and that most of the confusion is caused by officers lying outright or lying by omission in order to save their own faces (Benteen and Reno) or to save the faces of their fellow officers (almost all the other commissioned officers, including a steamboat captain who quietly "loses" a day of his chronology in order to avoid having to report an idiotic mistake made by the captain of the boat guard).

Gray's time-motion study is brilliant, and he provided me with all sorts of fascinating and helpful details, such as that the cavalry's "working trot" is 6 mph and that an ox-drawn wagon train can make 15 miles a day, while a mule train can make 20. The way he correlates and cross-checks his witness testimony is seriously beautiful to watch.

I wish he'd made a bigger deal of the part, buried at the absolute end of the book, where the archaeologists excavating the battlefield proved that Mitch Boyer died at the Little Bighorn by taking the pieces of skull they had and superimposing them on the only known photograph of Mitch Boyer. (In my guilty weakness for true crime shows, I've watched several cases of identity proven by this method, including Bun Chee Nyhuis [it's a weird photo of her, because she's making a face at the camera, but look at the way the skull fits her face].)

I don't know why I'm so fascinated by the Battle of the Little Bighorn, since I hate everything about it. I hate that the US Army was out there because President Grant and his Cabinet decided deliberately and with malice aforethought that they preferred breaking their word to the Sioux and Cheyenne over forcing American citizens to obey the law. For that matter, I hate every single one of the American citizens who decided that the possibility of gold was a good enough reason to ignore the fact that the Black Hills were off-limits, a good enough reason to trample all over the rights and beliefs of other human beings. (Do not talk to me about "pioneer spirit." You will not like what I have to say.) I hate the foreknowledge of the Sioux' defeat (Wounded Knee is only fourteen years in the future); I hate knowing that the Native American peoples who chose to honor their agreements and treaties with the American government (especially the Crow and Arikara, who were out there with the Army, scouting and dying for these entitled assholes) are going to get screwed over every bit as badly as the "hostile" peoples. And at the same time, I hate watching the catastrophe befalling the Seventh Cavalry; I hate knowing that Custer is leading his men to a terrible death (and as much as I loathe and despise what those men are out in Montana doing, most of them are not to blame, are merely men trying to do their duty as best they can); I hate--and yet am mesmerized by--watching the process of that catastrophe unfold.

Gray is bitterly lucid about the betrayal of the Native American peoples by the American government and its citizens. He is absolutely forthright about the lies and mistakes he catches the officers of the Seventh Cavalry in, and he is fierce in his championing of Mitch Boyer and Curley.

This is not a good place to start with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but if you are already interested, Gray's time-motion analysis is fascinating.



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