Katherine Addison's Blog, page 11

Happy Book Day to Me!

The Angel of the Crows goes on sale today!

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Author's Copies!

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Amazon's Best Books for June!

The Angel of the Crows is one of Amazon's Best Books for June. Tell your friends!

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Review: Bugliosi, Helter Skelter (1974)

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is, of course, the seminal text on Charles Manson. It is thorough, comprehensive, and clearly written---and an engrossing train wreck. I actually preferred Jeff Guinn's Manson biography, but appreciate Helter Skelter for the up close, blow by blow account of the trial, and of course Bugliosi's first-hand opinions of Charles Manson. I didn't warm to Bugliosi very much as a narrator, but he seems to have been as good a prosecutor as he thought he was. Certainly his investigation put the LAPD to shame (except for the LaBianca detectives, who were on the ball), and he does an excellent job of laying out all his evidence, no matter how far out on a tangent he has to go to get the one piece of information he needs.



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Review: Kelly, The Boston Stranglers (2013)

The Boston Stranglers by Susan Kelly

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the obverse face of Gerold Frank's The Boston Strangler; Kelly doesn't think DeSalvo committed ANY of the murders. (DNA proved her wrong the same year this updated edition came out: DeSalvo's DNA was matched to evidence from Mary Sullivan's murder---or was it? Kelly's response raises doubts.) Kelly makes a better argument than Frank, while uncovering evidence that says Frank had a vested monetary interest in DeSalvo being the Strangler.

I admit, I find Kelly more plausible than Frank. Even if DeSalvo committed the Sullivan murder (he got a lot of details wrong in his confession, which, since he was reputed to have a photographic memory, makes me uneasy), this does nothing to link him to any of the others, and Kelly finds other, more plausible suspects who got off on technicalities or who weren't pursued because DeSalvo confessed. (Note that he was never prosecuted, much less convicted, for ANY of the strangling cases.) And that confession is, it is painfully obvious, specious nonsense; DeSalvo was shown crime scene photographs BEFORE he made his confessions, and the transcripts reveal Bottomly (who had no qualifications to conduct an interrogation) leading his witness something fierce.

I don't know the answer. But Kelly certainly provides a more thorough investigation and opens up a lot of questions that Frank sweeps under the rug.



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Review: Longtine, Murder in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2014)

Murder in Michigan's Upper Peninsula by Sonny Longtine

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a collection of brief write-ups of murders that have occurred in the U.P. The writing is not very good, and you can tell on the occasions when Longtine could interview someone still alive about one of the murders, because they get quoted extensively whether particularly relevant or not. There are also digressions about things like the Beaux Arts courthouse in Marquette, Michigan. It's the sort of book that correctly gets labeled "local interest."



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Review: Dickey, Ghostland (2016)

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a book I wish had been written twenty years ago, so I could have used it in my dissertation. Dickey is talking specifically about ghost stories and the cultural work they do and would have been a great source for my chapter on non-theatrical ghosts, which, to be perfectly honest, could have used the support.

I loved this book. Dickey looks at haunted places: houses, hotels, brothels (the bit on Mustang Ranch was great), bars, prisons, cemeteries, a park under a bridge. He has a wonderful section on New Orleans. He is probably the only person I will ever find using Katie Letcher Lyle's book about Zona Heaster Shue, The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives, as a secondary source. Dickey is terrier-like in his determination to dig out the facts behind ghost stories. Not surprisingly, most of the time he finds there AREN'T very many facts and most of them have been twisted out of true by the needs and tropes of the ghost story as a genre. (The section on the House of Seven Gables was marvelous, as was the section where he asks why all of Richmond's Shockoe Bottom ghosts are white, when the slave markets are RIGHT THERE.)

Dickey, while explicitly stating that he isn't interested in whether ghosts are "real" or not, is nevertheless very respectful of the beliefs of the people he talks to and very willing to admit when he himself feels something unheimlich (really, I could SO have used this book when I was writing my dissertation in the early 'oughts.), and quietly disapproving of people, particularly the legions of paranormal investigators trying to make the big time, who are seeking to capitalize on something that Dickey sees as being about tragedy before it's about anything else. Tragedy and history and our need to tell stories to ourselves to make sense of the unexplainable.



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Review: Rouse, Missing (2009)

Missing - Every Year, Thousands of People Vanish Without Trace. Here are the True Stories Behind Some of These Mysteries by Rose Rouse

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is, unfortunately, a collection of human interest stories about missing persons cases, starting with Madeleine McCann and ranging from person-goes-out-and-never-comes-back to an adopted child finding his birth parents. The stories all feel like something you'd read in a "women's magazine." All of them are either ongoing mysteries or have resulted in the lost person being found alive and well. Whether on purpose or not, Rouse has managed to avoid all stories that end with the discovery of a body.

Not a good fit for my tastes.



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Review: Churchwell, Careless People (2014)

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent book that's a little bit difficult to describe. It's part biography of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, part history of the Jazz Age, part literary analysis of The Great Gatsby, and part examination of the unsolved Hall-Mills murder that was part of the inspiration for Gatsby. Churchwell does an amazing, effortless-seeming job of moving between her topics, always linking one back to the other three. She has combed exhaustively through primary sources, including Fitzgerald's scrapbook of newspaper clippings about himself, biographies and autobiographies of people the Fitzgeralds met in New York and Long Island in the early 1920s, and letters, his to her, hers to him, theirs to other people.

This is beautifully written and fascinating. She conjures up the Fitzgeralds' glittering world while at the same time making clear how savagely self-destructive it was. "Careless people" is of course a quote from Gatsby, but it also describes Scott and Zelda, and there was nothing they were more careless with than themselves.



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Review: Strong, Erased (2008)

Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives by Marilee Strong

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book is about what Strong (and her co-author Mark Powelson) calls "eraser killers," taking Scott Peterson as her type case: men who not merely murder their wives and girlfriends, but who go to elaborate lengths either to make the body disappear (erase the woman) or to make the murder look like something else: a suicide, an accident, a natural death (erase the crime). Strong has assembled an almost overwhelming cornucopia of such cases, which is part of her point, as the subtitle, Missing Women, Murdered Wives,shows. She says that we have no way of knowing how many eraser killers GOT AWAY WITH IT, never prosecuted because their deception was successful or (as with the disappearance of Kristin Smart) the police don't have enough evidence.

Strong argues that eraser killers are a particular subset of psychopaths, high-functioning psychopaths who DON'T have a history of criminal behavior, but who also have high degrees of narcissism and Machiavellianism. (I'm a little unsure about using "Machiavellianism" as a psychiatric term, but she's following the lead of a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and, okay, it does mean exactly what she's using it to mean.) They're men who are pathological liars (one such man had deceived his wife that, WHILE THEY WERE MARRIED, he had (a) finished college, (b) applied to medical school, and (c) been accepted, and he killed her three days before they were supposed to relocate so he could attend) with a strong dose of Peter Pan. They very frequently kill their pregnant partners because they don't want the responsibility of fatherhood. They're Teflon-coated. And they are experts at mimicking emotions like love. Everyone thought Scott Peterson was the perfect husband... until Laci Peterson disappeared.

This is a fascinating, horrifying book (the studies that found homicide was the #1 or #2 cause of death for pregnant women), and Strong uses her dreadfully abundant material well.



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