Katherine Addison's Blog, page 13

Review: Renner, Amy (2006)

Amy: My Search for Her Killer: Secrets & Suspects in the Unsolved Murder of Amy Mihaljevic by James Renner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a memoir of investigating a cold case: the 1989 abduction and murder of Amy Mihaljevic. Renner freely admits he's obsessed, and he's very honest about the moments when his obsession gets the better of him, also very honest about the frustrations of chasing dead end lead after dead end lead. This book provides an excellent feel of what it's like to be an investigative journalist (or a detective) and thus demonstrates why, as much as I love true crime, I have no desire to write it. It would require INTERVIEWING PEOPLE, and the thought just makes me want to hide. I had moments in reading this book where I was actually cringing away from the page, which I guess gives a good indicator of how vividly Renner writes.

Renner doesn't solve the mystery of Amy Mihaljevic's murder (the case is in fact still unsolved), so---like his other memoir/investigation, TRUE CRIME ADDICT---the book doesn't provide any tidy resolutions or answered questions. That's part of what I like about it, the way it stares at a frustrating snarl of evidence without explaining it away, and, while Renner puts forward theories, they tend to get shot down (sometimes to recrudesce as he discovers more evidence and/or talks to more witnesses), or to dissolve into still more unanswerable questions. In one sense, this is the record of repeated failure; on the other hand, it's the record of how investigation works, and the book is full of investigators who have not given up on Amy Mihaljevic's case. I love reading about the process of investigation, the process of trying out story after story to see which one fits, if any. The fact that no one's found the right story yet doesn't make the process less fascinating.



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Review: Cep, Furious Hours (2019)

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This excellent book must have been a bitch to write. Cep is telling nested stories: first the story (insofar as it can be pieced together) of the Reverend Willie Maxwell, who may or may not have murdered 5 members of his family for the insurance payout, and who was himself murdered at the funeral of the last of his possible victims, then the story of Maxwell's attorney, Tom Radney, who was also the attorney for Maxwell's murderer (and got him off with an insanity plea, which amounted to a few weeks in the hospital and then, pronounced sane, being released), and then the story of Harper Lee trying and failing to tell the story of the Reverend Willie Maxwell. All three of these stories are also stories about race in the South, itself a difficult subject, and then all obscured by the passage of time and the intrinsic secretiveness of Harper Lee. Yeah. A bitch to write.

Cep does a beautiful job. The book is gorgeously readable and she deals with her wide-ranging subjects gracefully (which I do not mean as a synonym for either "tactfully" or "ignoring the problematic bits"). And the true crime story in the middle is maddening and fascinating. (I was also very interested to learn how much Harper Lee had to do with the writing of In Cold Blood, and how ungratefully Capote treated her, his childhood friend, thereafter.) Did the Reverend do it? If he did, how did he pull it off? I completely understand why Harper Lee was defeated by the combination of the elusive nature of the story and her own demons.

I'm not sure Cep finds any answers. Certainly she does not solve the mystery of the Reverend---which to be fair is not her project at all---and the answers to Harper Lee are possibly unfindable. But Cep does say, HEY HERE ARE SOME QUESTIONS, and she poses those questions extremely well.



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FYI: Goodreads giveaway of The Angel of the Crows

Right now, Tor is doing a giveaway on Goodreads of The Angel of the Crows. Details here.

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Review: Freeman, The Field of Blood (2018)

The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent and extremely readable history of violence in Congress in the decades leading up to the Civil War. The infamous caning of Charles Sumner was not an isolated incident, and Freeman does a fantastic job of showing how violence and the threat of violence were used as tools by Southern congressmen to bully Northern congressmen into silence (just as they were using the threat of secession for a long time before anyone actually seceded). Freeman explores the ideology of Southern violence (the "code of honor") and presents the logic by which Southern congressmen considered themselves the victims of "degradation" and sectional violence. And she shows Northern congressmen's fear and frustration (and the marvelous non-violent tactics of John Quincy Adams) and how that fear slowly turned into responsive violence. Northerners started physically fighting back, and she argues that Congress acted as a microcosm and a barometer, both a cause and an effect of the growing tension and mutual mistrust between North and South. Violence in Congress didn't CAUSE the Civil War, but it was part of the vicious, escalating circle that kept North and South at each other's throats.

This is also, as sort of a subplot, a biography of Benjamin Brown French (whose claim to fame today is probably that he was the uncle of Daniel Chester French, who sculpted the Lincoln Memorial). French was a lot of things, but one of them was a voluminous diarist and another was someone who, through his various jobs and political activity, had a front row seat to the goings-on in antebellum Washington D.C. She uses him as a primary source, but she also traces his political development from what was called a "doughface" (a Northern Democrat who sought to appease the South) to a fervent Republican and supporter of Lincoln, due in no small part to the way he witnessed Southern and Northern congressmen behaving from the late 1830s through to the outbreak of war. French is a method for her to maintain continuity of narrative even as her cast of Congressional characters come and go, and although I'm reluctant to play the Everyman card, French is a profoundly ordinary man, vain and a little gullible and not very good at self-reflection (though extraordinarily energetic), and his journey offers an intimate look at how what happened in Congress affected the people of the United States.



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Review: Roach, The Salem Witch Trials (2002)

The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-By-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege by Marilynne K. Roach

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a monumental work, both in that it is more than 600 pages long, counting appendices and in that, as the author says, it took her twenty-plus years. It's a day by day recounting of the Salem Village witchcraft crisis, correlated with things happening in surrounding villages, in Salem Town, in Boston (especially in the households of Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewell, since those gentlemen obligingly left records), on the Maine frontier, in England. She starts with an overview of Salem Village history from 1661 to 1691, then begins her exhaustive timeline in January 1692 and ends it with Samuel Sewell's apology in 1697, though she continues, in her epilogue, to note the aftereffects of the trials all the way to 2001, when the last of the accused were finally legally cleared of the charge of witchcraft. Her appendices list the accused, the afflicted, the accusers, those who signed petitions, and the membership of the Salem Village church. I longed for genealogical charts, but they would have required a supplementary volume to themselves, and she does note when two people are sisters or in-laws or otherwise related, revealing a web of interconnections and inter-relations that has not been apparent in any other book on Salem that I have read, even Boyer and Nussbaum's Salem Possessed, which is all about how the tensions between two Salem families were instrumental in causing the crisis. (She also, by noting the deaths of the Mather and Sewell children---and Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewell's reactions---makes very immediate and personal the horrible infant mortality rate in colonial New England, and really puts paid to the stereotype that the Puritans did not love their children.)

She does not speculate as to causes and motivations, merely notes the evidence as presented in the testimony of witnesses, both those who testified to the reality of the afflicted persons' sufferings and those who caught them in instances of fraud. She sorts out very patiently who said what and when they said it, and clarifies, for instance, that Cotton Mather never attended any of the witchcraft trials (only one hanging) and thus wrote his apologia on the simple assumption, not that spectral evidence was valid, but that if the judges---being intelligent and learned men---convicted a person, they must have done so for good reasons.

This is well-written, thoughtful, careful, extremely readable, even though it sounds like it wouldn't be. Highly recommended.



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Review: Casey, Deliver Us (2015)

Deliver Us: Three Decades of Murder and Redemption in the Infamous I-45/Texas Killing Fields by Kathryn Casey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a book about some of the cases in the three decades and counting worth of murders (some solved, some unsolved, and some stuck in the limbo of we know who it is but we can't prove it) along I-45 between Houston and Galveston. Overall, Casey is a competent writer, although she has a tendency to oversell things that need to be undersold, and she has doggedly interviewed everyone who would sit still long enough, including the families of the victims, the investigating officers, and the prime suspects.

The book is necessarily somewhat inconclusive, since so many of the cases are unsolved (two victims were identified in 2019, and one of the main we know who it is but we can't prove it suspects led the police to two of his victims' bodies IN 2015), but Casey has done her best to find a narrative of each case (one victim's father founded Texas EquuSearch; another victim's parents have also gotten involved in helping the search for missing persons; one case got solved because an evidence officer fourteen years later had the wit to resubmit samples for DNA testing)---which would be why her subtitle includes the word "redemption." She doesn't mean for the killers (her interviews with them make it clear that redemption for them is a long way off, if possible at all; a couple are clearly psychopaths, for whom the word "redemption" is meaningless). She means for the families who have brute-forced good out of evil and for the investigators who haven't given up.



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Review: Stiles, Jesse James (2002)

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War by T.J. Stiles

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is both a biography of Jesse James and a social history of Missouri from about the 1850s to 1882, the year of James' death. As Stiles argues, the two are inextricably intertwined. Stiles makes no attempt to make Jesse James a sympathetic character, but he assesses him carefully and comes to the conclusion that, aside from being a ruthless, unrepentant killer, he was both politics-savvy and attention-hungry, combining his crimes with the rhetoric of the "Lost Cause" to make himself shockingly important in the politics of post Civil War Missouri. As always, my favorite chapter was the meta-analysis, where Stiles talks about the various narratives that have been laid over the figure of Jesse James, holding them up to James' biographical reality and discovering that none of them really fits.

This is a dense and cogently argued book that shines a pitiless light on the failure of Reconstruction as the backdrop to Jesse James' career.



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Review: Ostwald, Vaslav Nijinsky (1991)

Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap Into Madness by Peter Ostwald

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[my copy is signed "To Patricia" from Nijinsky's daughter Tamara]

This is an excellent biography of a very difficult subject, the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who "went mad" at the age of 30 and spent the second half of his life essentially mute. Even before that, Nijinsky was notoriously bad at communicating except through dance, so most of what Ostwald has to work with is what other people said about him. This is particularly problematic in the case of Nijinsky's wife Romola, who set herself up as the authority on all things Nijinsky and wrote two books about him, but who was demonstrably untruthful. Ostwald does a marvelous job of combing through Nijinsky's incomplete medical records and other sources both to assess Romola's narrative and to piece together an alternative story.

Not that there's a great deal of story to be had. Nijinsky's inner life remains inaccessible. Once he ceased to dance, it seems likely that that inner life was cruelly impoverished. This is a very sad biography, the story of someone whose enormous talent went largely wasted, in no small part, as Ostwald points out, because of his inability to work with others. His dreadful communication skills and his perfectionism combined to make him a nightmare for other dancers trying to work with him on his own (radically innovative) choreography, while his "temperament"---his depressive apathies and manic temper tantrums, both signs of his underlying psychological problems---made him equally a nightmare for those trying to get him to work, to perform regularly and to schedule, necessary for anyone wanting a career as a dancer. There's no doubt that Nijinsky was a genius, equally no doubt that that genius was something Nijinsky's flawed and tragically fragile psyche could not maintain without the help of the people (like his sister Bronislava) whom he drove away.



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Review: Sher, "Until You Are Dead" (2002)

"Until You Are Dead": Steven Truscott's Long Ride into History by Julian Sher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Despite its clunky title, this is a very good book about the Canadian Steven Truscott, who in 1959, at the age of 15, was sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper---a crime he did not commit. (His sentence was commuted to life in prison.) The book is partly a biography of Truscott and partly an investigation of the investigation into Lynne Harper's murder, pulling all the evidence out and examining it carefully, including evaluation of witnesses. The prosecution built its case on two child witnesses who couldn't keep their own stories straight but whose evidence pointed to Truscott's guilt, while seeking to discredit child witnesses who told consistent stories that exonerated Truscott. Also, because the laws of discovery in 1959 didn't require them to, the prosecution did not turn over to the defense a BOATLOAD of evidence that pointed toward Truscott's innocence, choosing instead to harp on the cherry-picked evidence that did not contradict the theory of Truscott's guilt. The trial judge was also biased toward the prosecution, and his charge to the jury was both biased and factually inaccurate. And then, of course, the authorities doubled-down as the legal question became a political question, not was Steven Truscott innocent? but were the police wrong? Judging by this book, it's almost impossible for someone living in 2020 to imagine how infallible the police and the legal system were perceived to be in 1959 and how vitally necessary the government felt that perception to be. (Many people in power seemed to feel that admitting error in the case of Steven Truscott would be tantamount to approving the downfall of Canadian civilization.) The history of Steven Truscott's attempts to prove his innocence is also a cultural history of the paradigm shift that is the 1960s, as mainstream culture learned to distrust its authority figures.

The book was published before a decision was reached in Truscott's final appeal, but Wikipedia tells me his conviction was overturned in 2007---even though, even then he wasn't declared innocent. It was merely admitted, finally, almost 50 years later, that his guilt was not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.



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Review: Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil (2012)

The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty by Simon Baron-Cohen

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This is an okay book about how empathy works in the brain. Baron-Cohen is arguing that we should replace the idea of "evil"---which explains nothing about human nature---with the idea of zero empathy. People with borderline, antisocial, and narcissistic personality disorders have what he calls zero-negative empathy, which includes intentional cruelty and has no redeeming characteristics, while people on the autism spectrum have what he calls zero-positive empathy: they don't understand other people's emotions, but have no intent to harm, and their lack of empathy is (often) paired with increased pattern-recognition ability. I'm dubious about this descriptive schema, mostly because I feel like the gap between the autism spectrum and personality disorders is wider than he's trying to make it out to be (I also think he gets a little starry-eyed at the end, when he's talking about teaching empathy to psychopaths), but I think he's right that "zero empathy" is a more useful explanatory tool than "evil."

Three stars.

ETA 2020/03/01 The more I think about it, the less I like Baron-Cohen's ideas. Downgraded to two stars.



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