Katherine Addison's Blog, page 16

Review: Archibald, Bloody Scotland

Bloody Scotland: Crime in 19th Century Scotland by Malcolm Archibald

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A somewhat superficial look at crime in Scotland in the 19th century. Anecdotal in structure and style and not particularly well-written. Did give me the etymology of the word "navvy" (from "railway navigators," in turn from "inland navigators," being the men who dug canals).



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Review: Larson, Dead Wake

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[audiobook]
[library]

I'm kind of hit or miss with Erik Larson. I stopped reading The Devil in the White City halfway through and I'm currently reading Thunderstruck, which is not gripping me, but Dead Wake was fantastic. Possibly there's something about the structure of a shipwreck which suits his style: the bringing together by coincidence of widely disparate elements. So Larson can talk about the passengers (themselves wildly disparate), the crew, the Lusitania herself, the u-boat that sank her, the spies in England who were intercepting German communications. He can even talk about Woodrow Wilson and his attempts to avoid World War I. And it all DOES come together in one disaster.

I learned many things I did not know, including the fact that WWI u-boats had no way to see OUT, except for (a) the periscope and (b) the very small and generally shuttered windows in the conning tower. So a u-boat at cruising depth was literally blind. They steered by charts and dead reckoning, and I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.

The audiobook narrator was also excellent. Scott Brick is the guy who narrated In the Heart of the Sea, and I happily listened to him reading endnotes--which I don't think is the reason I approve of Dead Wake more than Larson's other books, but it doesn't hurt.



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Review: Ballard, The Discovery of the Titanic

The Discovery of the Titanic by Robert D. Ballard

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Does what it says on the tin.

Unfortunately, Ballard is not a particularly engaging writer, so while the chapters actually talking about exploring the Titanic with their tiny submarine are very interesting, the rest of the book is kind of tedious. I'm left without much to say about it.



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Review: Lachman, Footsteps in the Snow

Footsteps in the Snow by Charles Lachman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


True crime about the murder of Maria Ridulph in 1957 and the seeming solution to the cold case in 2012. I say "seeming" because Jack McCullough's conviction was overturned and the case is as unsolved today as it was the day Maria was abducted.

Lachman does not offer any meta-analysis, but it's pretty clear he thinks McCullough did it. On the evidence he presents, mostly things coming out of McCullough's own mouth, it's hard NOT to think McCullough did it. The other evidence--the deathbed confession of McCullough's mother, the identification by the only witness--is really really shaky, even though Lachman doesn't ever acknowledge just how shaky. Eyewitness testimony at a distance of 55 years from a woman who was 7 years old in 1957? the deathbed confession of a woman who was drugged to the eyeballs on morphine and Haldol and only intermittently lucid? No mention is made of the studies on eyewitness testimony and just how unreliable it is or any other acknowledgment that the defense attorney had all kinds of reasonable doubt to work with. He puts the reader in the position of a believer rather than a skeptic, which is common in true crime, but I would argue, not good.



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The Goblin Emperor e-book deal

Tor is running a promotion where The Goblin Emperor e-book is $1.99. (Even though Macmillan's site still says $8.99, all the links have the right price.) Obviously this is a golden opportunity. :)

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Review: Karr-Morse & Wiley, Ghosts from the Nursery

Ghosts From The Nursery: Tracing The Roots Of Violence by Robin Karr-Morse

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I wanted this book to be more interesting than it was. Maybe it's just that it's 20 years old, or that its conclusions seem so common-sense to me: yes, of course, the first three years of a person's life are vital to their development, and if those years are filled with abuse and neglect, the person is likely--though not guaranteed--to turn out violent, impulsive, and thus most likely to commit violent crimes. Intervention can turn a child's life around, but the earlier the better, and sometimes no amount of intervention can undo the damage done. Their prose was competent but unexciting, and I never felt really engaged by the book.



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Review: Millard, River of Doubt

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


[library]
[audiobook]

I don't know about this one. I listened to it with great attention (the reader is excellent), and I enjoyed it, but when it was over, I was left feeling sort of meh? about it. Millard has certainly done her research, and she has a good prose style. I can't tell if it's that she killed her own efforts at suspense (quoting from Roosevelt's post-expedition accounts makes it quite clear that he survived, no matter how dramatically you describe his near-death state) or if it's just that there isn't very much story here: Roosevelt and a Brazilian explorer descend a hitherto uncharted river in the hostile heart of the Amazon. All but three of their company make it out alive--one drowning, one murder, and the murderer who fled into the jungle and was presumably killed by something or someone in very quick order. There's a lot of individual events that are quite exciting, in various ways, but there's no real throughline, and I can't quite put my finger on why. (I found the bits set in New York much more vivid and compelling than the bits set in Brazil, and I'm not sure why that is, either, except possibly that where Millard really excels is in writing the history of complicated and sophisticated human interactions, and the thing that this expedition stripped right out of everybody was complexity and sophistication.)

In any event, if you're interested in Theodore Roosevelt or the history of the exploration of the Amazon, this is well worth checking out, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it more generally.

Three stars? Four stars? I'm going to give it four, but that's for the way she writes the set-up and denouement, not the expedition that is the point of the book.



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Review: Masters, Killing for Company

Killing for Company: The Story of a Man Addicted to Murder by Brian Masters




I don't think the comparisons with In Cold Blood are justified (mostly because In Cold Blood is so much its own thing that it's hard to compare anything to it usefully), but this is a very good book about how and why one particular serial killer became what he was (he died last year).

Nilsen would be tragic if he hadn't killed fifteen young men: intelligent, ambitious, driven by his staunch union beliefs, living alone except for his faithful mongrel bitch Bleep, unable to form connections with other (living) people. But then there are the murders and his macabre near worship of the corpses ... and the utterly grotesquely utilitarian methods by which he disposed of the bodies.

Masters is a very calm dispassionate narrator, always looking past what Nilsen--who was extremely articulate--said about what he did to the reasons underneath. He does an excellent job of showing where the crevasse in Nilsen's psyche was, even if he can't quite explain it any more than Nilsen or any of the defense or prosecution psychiatrists can.



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Review: Reel, Perrusquia & Sullivan, The Blood of Innocents

Blood of Innocents: The True Story of Multiple Murder in West Memphis, Arkansas by Guy Reel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Like Devil's Knot, this is a book about the West Memphis murders. It was written before Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley were offered an Alford plea, and it is much less certain about their innocence. I would call it agnostic, really. Reel, Perrusquia, and Sullivan don't have a theory; they are just telling the story of the case. (Which is itself a loaded undertaking, but I don't think they have an axe to grind.) Although Leveritt includes a lot of information in Devil's Knot that Reel, Perrusquia, and Sullivan don't have, they present some details she leaves out, including unfortunate details that point towards Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley's possible guilt. There are things she paints as ridiculous about the police investigation that they provide real explanations of--explanations that have to have been available to Leveritt as well.

But there's a lot they agree on. Reel, Perrusquia, and Sullivan do emphasize that the police investigation was a mess and that the prosecutors didn't present evidence beyond a reasonable doubt in court. They may not be sure about guilt or innocence, but they make it clear that Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley did not get fair trials. I got less angry reading this book than I did Leveritt--who is trumpeting MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE on almost every page about the trials--but the calmer assessment comes down to the same thing.

This was a better book than I was expecting (based on its paperback original publication and its lurid and badly designed cover, which I know isn't fair). Four stars.



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Review: Johnson, What Lisa Knew

What Lisa Knew by Joyce Johnson




One of the many sad things about Lisa Steinberg is that I'd never heard of her before. Her murder is yet another cause celebre that vanished overnight--all those Crimes of the Century that turn out not to be--the major difference in Lisa's case being that she was only six years old when she died in 1987, the victim of a combination of child abuse and child neglect. It's questionable, I suppose, whether her alleged parents (black-market adoption, and they never bothered to get the paperwork done to make it legal) meant for her to die, but one of them beat her to death and they both failed to call an ambulance for possibly as much as 12 hours.

Johnson's major point--aside from the general outrage at the way Lisa was treated and the way that all the adults around her seem to have been struck blind when it came to noticing egregious signs of neglect and abuse--is the way in which Hedda Nussbaum (Lisa's "mother") and her attorneys deployed a set of narratives and cultural beliefs, about mothers, about battered women, to simply shut down any line of questioning that wondered about Nussbaum's complicity--or agency--in Lisa's death. They put it all on Joel Steinberg; Nussbaum testified against him, and that, too, provided a very simple narrative schema, where her role as witness/victim of Steinberg's abuse (and I don't want to deny that Steinberg abused her; they may have had a BDSM relationship, but it was neither safe, nor sane, and while it started out consensual, I'm not sure it stayed that way) precluded her being an abuser herself. Johnson does not believe this narrative and goes to considerable, careful lengths to re-open those thorny questions. Her abhorrence of both Nussbaum and Steinberg comes through very clearly.

This is a very good, very sad book.



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