Katherine Addison's Blog, page 14

Review: McThenia & Cutright, A Case for Solomon (2012)

A Case for Solomon: Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping That Haunted a Nation by Tal McThenia

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent book about the Bobby Dunbar kidnapping case. (One of the co-writers is Bobby Dunbar's granddaughter.) It's beautifully and carefully written, exhaustive in its research, and as empathetic as possible with all sides.

(Short version: Bobby Dunbar, age 4, disappeared in 1912. In 1913, his (middle to upper-middle class) parents claimed a child found with an itinerant tinker as Bobby, even though the child had a well-attested (rural poor) identity as Bruce Anderson. W. C. Walters, the tinker, was tried for kidnapping and found guilty, though later released on a technicality. The protests of Bruce's mother were swept under the rug. The child was brought up as Bobby Dunbar. In 2004, one of his sons and one of his brother's sons agreed to a paternity test, which proved that in fact "Bobby Dunbar" was not Bobby Dunbar. Proving he was actually Bruce Anderson would require exhuming his body for a mitochondrial DNA test, and neither the Dunbars nor the Andersons feel this to be either necessary or desirable.)

McThenia and Cutright trace the story from Bobby Dunbar's disappearance, and they go very carefully into the reasons Lessie and Percy Dunbar came to believe, whole-heartedly and vehemently, that this was their child, and the reasons that they carried a lot of people with them. It's hard to tell from this distance and with mostly newspaper reports to go on (and McThenia and Cutright do a GREAT job with the newspapers, recognizing that the reporters were players in the story rather than objective recorders of it), what Bobby/Bruce understood about what was going on and why he did---or didn't---do certain things, such as his failure/refusal to recognize his real mother (he'd been traveling with Walters long enough that it's possible he really didn't remember her, although no one in 1913 seems to have entertained that idea), his passing all the "tests" of his identity that were reported in the papers, his general willingness to BE Bobby Dunbar. (Also, Bobby and Bruce seem to have had remarkably similar dispositions, so it wasn't as if he had to do any acting.) McThenia and Cutright offer some very mild speculations, but the inner world of a 4 to 5 year old child in 1913 is really just not available to us.

The book provokes a lot of unanswerable questions about the malleability of memory and identity, and the most unanswerable and bleakest of them all is, what happened to the real Bobby Dunbar? This is something McThenia and Cutright don't go into at all, and I wish they would have---not that there's very much there except the trail of his footprints that ended abruptly at the railroad tracks. To me, it looks like Bobby Dunbar really was kidnapped, but what happened to him after that is as much a mystery as what happened to Charley Ross. So it wouldn't have been more than a paragraph, but I would have liked just that acknowledgment that if "Bobby Dunbar" was really Bruce Anderson, there's still a child missing, a child whom the world stopped looking for in 1913.



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Review: Scott, Uncovering History (2013)

Uncovering History: Archaeological Investigations at the Little Bighorn by Douglas D. Scott

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is an overview of all the archaeological projects, both amateur and professional, at the Little Bighorn battlefields, going all the way back, as best as can be done, to 1876. Scott writes very clearly, and, as is obvious from the record of my reviews, I find the archaeology of the Little Bighorn fascinating. I particularly like the uses to which they are putting the discoveries of criminological ballistics. Not only can they trace the movement of individual weapons on the battlefield, they have been able to confirm the identities of several extant weapons (which is about the most iron-clad provenance you could ask for). They are also using, when they can, other techniques pioneered by law enforcement in their attempts to identify the skeletal remains that still are found from time to time. The remarkable thing is that they have been successful more than once.

If you're interested in the archaeology of the Little Bighorn, this is a good place to start.



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Review: Vronsky, Serial Killers (2004)

Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book gets better as it goes along. The first chapter or so, on historical serial killers, is sketchy and does not distinguish clearly between things "everybody knows" about famous historical serial killers vs. things that have a basis in actual history. However, Vronsky improves mightily when talking about modern serial killers. He's very good at case studies and can range widely from the well-known to the obscure. He spends a chapter on behavioral profiling and criticism thereof and provides what seems to me an even handed assessment. And his last chapter is practical advice on avoiding becoming a victim.



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Review: Abel, John Wilkes Booth and the Women Who Loved Him

John Wilkes Booth and the Women Who Loved Him by E. Lawrence Abel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is an interesting book with a terrible title.

It's half a biography of John Wilkes Booth and half biographies of the women who were involved with him: prostitutes, actresses, and a senator's daughter. It is not particularly academic in tone, although he's clearly done his research, especially in finding out what happened to all these women after Booth died, and it is neither feminist nor misogynistic (aside from some fat-shaming that should have been excised). He also argues that Booth had syphilis and that the mental effects of tertiary syphilis go a fair ways toward explaining why Booth assassinated President Lincoln. I don't know that I entirely believe him on that last part, but certainly his evidence that Booth had syphilis is convincing.

Worth checking out if you are interested either in Booth/the Lincoln assassination or in American theater of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Three and a half stars, round up to four.



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Review: Wert, Custer

Custer by Jeffry D. Wert

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is not as good a biography as either Custer's Trials or Touched by Fire. Wert soft-pedals things, like Custer's racism, that Stiles faces head on, and he doesn't offer the kaleidoscopic view that Barnett does. He's also not as good a writer as either of them. (Also, I think he's wrong about what happened at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.) In general, he seems more concerned to paint Custer in a favorable light than I think the historical facts quite warrant.

This isn't by any means a bad biography; I've just read better.



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Review: Scott et al., Archaeological Perspectives on the Battle of the Little Bighorn

Archaeological Perspectives on the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Douglas D. Scott

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


One of the delightful things about used bookstores is that sometimes you find something you thought you'd never see. This book is one of those.

This book is the compiled results of the 1983-85 archaeological investigations at the two sites of the Battle of the Little Bighorn: the field where Custer and all of his men were killed and the hill where Reno and Benteen (mostly Benteen) kept their men together through a two-day siege. The archaeologists go over everything they found: human bones, animal bones, bullets, cartridge cases, buttons, tin cans, spurs, arrowheads, pocket knives ..., and they wring every last drop of information out of their finds. (One of the authors, Richard Fox, would go on to write one of my favorite books about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Archaeology, History, and Custer's Last Battle, in which he uses the bullets and cartridge cases to trace the course of the battle; two others, Douglas Scott and Melissa Connor, with a third author, P. Willey, wrote They Died with Custer, about the human bones.) They discuss a number of mysteries and theories about the battle and bring their evidence to bear. Extractor failure is not supported as a major factor in the defeat; there is no evidence for mass suicide. The men who may or may not be buried in Deep Ravine, the archaeologists conclude, have been buried so deeply by the vagaries of erosion and deposition that metal detectors can't see them and the excavations they were able to do couldn't go deep enough to find them.

This is an academic book and is concommitantly dry, but it's an excellent snapshot of what archaeology does and a valuable factual perspective on the Battle of the Little Bighorn.



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Review: Titone, My Thoughts Be Bloody

My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy by Nora Titone

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is not as good a biography of John Wilkes Booth as American Brutus; on the other hand, it is a very good collective biography of Junius Brutus Booth and his two most famous sons, Edwin and John Wilkes. Edwin, largely forgotten now, was the preeminent Shakespearean actor of his day---much more famous in his time than John Wilkes could ever hope to be, and this, Titone argues, is at the root of John Wilkes Booth's decision to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

She's weakest, actually, on the assassination; although she believes JWB was a Confederate spy (a claim which Kauffman in American Brutus finds dubious), she doesn't provide any details about what JWB was allegedly doing for the Confederacy, and she skips over the lengthy and elaborate plotting that went on among JWB and his co-conspirators, just as she fails entirely to mention the trial for treason after JWB's death.

Her focus is very much on the intrafamilial tensions of the Booths, the poisonous legacy (I think, although Titone doesn't specifically argue) of their famous, unbalanced father. Titone does argue, and handiliy proves, that Edwin Booth's life was shaped and ruined by his adolescence as his father's keeper, and she seems to think that JWB's faults can be traced to the lack of a male role model (JBB being first continually on the road and then dead) and to the bitter relationship between JWB and Edwin, a back and forth of treachery and abandonment and a kind of passive-aggressive oneupsmanship that Edwin seems to have specialized in. Neither of them ever forgave the other for anything.

Titone seems to follow Asia Booth Clarke (who wrote memoirs of her father and her brothers) in feeling that JWB was just a rash, hot-headed boy. She certainly doesn't give him any of the credit for Machiavellianism that Kauffman does (although she does note his preternatural ability to talk people into things), and she doesn't do anything to bridge the gap between his outspoken embrace of the Confederate cause and the rather desperate place his life was in in the spring of 1865, and the moment he jumps out of the Lincolns' box and shouts Sic semper tyranis. She notes that nobody could understand the logic behind the assassination, but offers no explanation herself.

She's much stronger on Edwin than she is on JWB, probably because Edwin was a voluminous correspondent and left a lot more material, and she does a great job of describing the nineteenth-century American theatrical milieu in which they both moved.



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Review: Faust, This Republic of Suffering

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a book about how the Civil War changed the way Americans dealt with death, both on the spiritual level and the intensely practical level of, we have all these dead bodies. What do we do with them? I found her most interesting when talking about the practicalities of burials (and reburials) and identifications and the way in which the modern armed forces ethos of bringing all soldiers home was born because of the problems created by this massive wall of death across the early 1860s, where you have civilian families on the one hand desperate to know what has become of their loved ones---are they alive? are the dead? where are their bodies?---and soldiers on the other trying to find ways to be sure that their families will receive that information. And the Army as an institution had nothing to do with it. It was up to volunteers and charitable workers and fellow soldiers to try to reconnect the broken tie. Sad and fascinating.



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Review: Horn, The Restless Sleep

The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City's Cold Case Squad by Stacy Horn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent book, written in 2004, about the NYPD Cold Case Squad. As I think I've mentioned before, I love cold case stories, and Horn does a fantastic job of following the case from the time the murder was reported to the time a cold case detective either finds the murderer or has to give up. (Or until she finished the book.) She's also just a great writer, someone whose prose it's enjoyable to spend time with, and she's very good at conveying the detectives who are her subjects. And she has the ability to tell anecdotes and make them meaningful, which is a rare talent indeed.



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Review: Michaud & Aynsesworth, Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer

Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer by Stephen G Michaud

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Transcripts of the interviews Michaud & Aynesworth conducted for their biography of Bundy, Only Living Witness. Interesting for two reasons: (1) Bundy, an intelligent and articulate man, trying to describe what it's like to be a serial killer; (2) the slow reveal that Bundy has been lying to Michaud & Aynesworth all along, both in relatively small ways, like denying his necrophilia, and in the biggest: he told them there was exculpatory evidence that proved he wasn't the "Ted" killer and sent them on wild goose chase after wild goose chase trying to find it. Even when Aynesworth confronts him head on, Bundy continues to claim his innocence. As is also evident in The Stranger Beside Me with Rule's relationship with Bundy, Bundy continued to try to manipulate Michaud & Aynesworth long after they were on to him. I particularly like him complaining that they aren't holding up their end of the bargain. Bundy was very good at gaslighting and moving goalposts, and without the transcripts of these interviews, he might have been able to string Michaud & Aynesworth along a lot longer, because it's the transcripts that allowed them to go back and compare what he actually had said with what he claimed he said.



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