Katherine Addison's Blog, page 19
December 13, 2018
Review: Vowell, Assassination Vacation
Assassination Vacation by Sarah VowellMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
[audiobook]
[library]
This is the first time I've finished an audiobook and gone back to the beginning to listen to it again. I loved this book. It hits my historical true crime buttons; it's also well-written and thoughtful. Vowell is always studying her own project and its implications even as she's tracking down obscure sites with connections to the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Also, I appreciate her sense of humor and the way she owns her own morbid geekery.
Vowell is the reader for the audiobook (with guest appearances by a wide and surprising variety of people), and once I got used to her voice and her timing, I became entirely on board with that choice. This is also the first time where the experience of listening to the audiobook has not been a second-best to reading the book on paper (although I am going to look for a paper copy as well).
View all my reviews
comments
November 21, 2018
Review: Peters, The Infamous Harry Hayward
The Infamous Harry Hayward: A True Account of Murder and Mesmerism in Gilded Age Minneapolis by Shawn Francis PetersMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I find myself profoundly meh about this book, so much so that I'm having a hard time thinking of anything to say about it. It wasn't a bad book, but it wasn't terribly interesting. (Also, the subtitle, "A True Account of Murder and Mesmerism in Gilded Age Minneapolis," is take a few liberties with the truth. Hayward was BELIEVED to mesmerize people, but there's not a lick of evidence to say he actually DID, and he was not a professional, or even amateur, mesmerist.) Hayward was, as Peters says, a textbook psychopath, charismatic, amoral, reckless, homicidal when bored. He devised an elaborate plot to cheat a young woman named Catherine Ging out of all her money and then kill her and collect on her life-insurance policies. The only really remarkable thing here is that he actually found a catspaw to commit the murder for him--on the mistaken theory that if he didn't pull the trigger himself, he couldn't be convicted of her murder. His second line of defense was to throw all the blame on his brother, and I suppose the other remarkable thing here is the Hawyard family dynamics, where in their parents' eyes the bad brother (and Harry Hayward was clearly a bad man long before he met Kittie Ging) could do no wrong and the good brother could do no right (and a third brother apparently stayed the hell out of it).
Competently written (although badly copy-edited) but without the particular gift for exposition that could make me fascinated by this case.
View all my reviews
comments
Review: Stone, The Anatomy of Evil
The Anatomy of Evil by Michael H. StoneMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
So Stone strikes me as oddly old-fashioned. I've been trying to put my finger on why--he talks about neuroscience and there's nothing noticeably outdated in his understanding of psychopathy and personality disorders. Maybe it's the nature of his project: a twenty-two tiered gradation of evil. Maybe it's that he quotes Dante in his chapter headings. I don't know, but the book does feel old-fashioned.
I appreciate that Stone is willing to take on the big philosophical questions, even if I don't always think he's done the best job of answering them. And his twenty-two gradations do make sense, going from murders of impulse to the likes of David Parker Ray and Leonard Lake. He talks about the reasons people end up on the scale, the neuroscience behind narcissism and antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy. He is less deterministic than Raine, which means I like him better, although still a little too fond of evolutionary biology theory and the idea that our speculations about how primitive human beings lived on the savannas of Africa explain why (mostly) men behave the way they do.
He does get things wrong--for instance somehow forgetting that Richard Speck raped his eight victims before he butchered them (when that fact is actually germane to his argument)--so I'm a little leery of how much weight to give him, but it is an interesting book.
View all my reviews
comments
Review: Lansing, Endurance
Endurance And Shackleton's Way by Alfred LansingMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
[audiobook]
[library]
On the one hand, this was disappointing because it was abridged. (WHY?) On the other hand, I disliked the reader, so perhaps it was just as well I only had to spend 6 hours with him.
This book is an account of Sir Ernest Shackleton's failed attempt to traverse Antarctica. (Their ship got trapped in the ice, then crushed, and they sledged their three boats across the pack ice, then sailed them to Elephant Island; then, leaving 22 of the men behind on what was basically an uninhabitable island, Shackleton took the most sea-worthy boat and sailed to South Georgia--which, by all rights, they should have died, Google Elephant Island and zoom out until you can see South Georgia, you'll see what I mean--and then, because they were on the wrong side of the island, he and two of his men walked across what was supposed to be the island's impassable interior. So I guess he got some traversing in after all.
(Not a single member of his crew died.)
Almost everyone seems to have kept a detailed diary, so if you want to write a more realistic version of Robinson Crusoe, even the abridged version of this book is full of verisimilitude and details.
It was disappointing, though, compared with In the Heart of the Sea, because--at least in the abridged version--it's nothing but a straightforward account of Shackleton's expedition, ending abruptly as soon as the last man has boarded the rescue ship. Nothing comparable to Philbrick's disquisitions on Nantucket and whaling and other relevant topics. There was no apparatus. (I am the person who listened to Philbrick's reader reading all of his endnotes, so keep that in mind.) It was gripping listening, but ultimately not very satisfying.
Three stars.
View all my reviews
comments
Review: Raine, The Anatomy of Violence
The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime by Adrian RaineMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Raine is a neurocriminologist, someone who looks for the causes of crime in the structures and functions of the brain. I learned a great deal about what various bits of the brain do and about what happens when they don't do their jobs properly. Raine dabbles his toes in evolutionary biology, about which I am sometimes a little dubious, and he leans toward determinism, which--I don't care if it's an illusion, I still prefer to believe I have free will. He at least suggests that there's a spectrum from free will to determinism, that people whose brains function properly have more choice about their actions than people whose brains don't. But I still don't know.
What irritated me most was Raine's attitude toward his readers. He assumes that his readers assume they are "normal" and that they've never thought particularly about the functioning of their own brains. Which, hello, WRONG. He discusses social science as if it is made of failure and doubly so for interpretive lenses like Marxism and feminism, which I think is an overly simplistic dismissal. Ditto for his attitude toward people who work for human rights and civil liberties. He sees them only as people who wrongheadedly prevent criminals from getting the treatment they need. And he's very naive about politics (for which he is to be forgiven, because this book was written before 2016).
So basically his material was fascinating, but his interpretations were sometimes sketchy.
View all my reviews
comments
November 12, 2018
comments
comments
Ramos & Smith, Smokejumper
Smokejumper: A Memoir by One of America's Most Select Airborne Firefighters by Jason A. RamosMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
So this is half a really good book about the history of wildfire in America since 1910 from the analytical perspective of a firefighter. The other half is a memoir, and once Ramos gets himself past rookie training as a Smokejumper, the memoir devolves into anecdotes. (Anecdotes are hard, because you have to stick the ending every time, and Ramos and Smith don't.) Even before that, it is honestly not a great memoir; Ramos' and Smith's narrative skills don't seem to trend that way. They're better at explaining things than at telling stories. Which is frustrating because the other half of the book is so interesting, and I felt like Ramos' subject matter in the memoir could easily have kept up, but didn't.
View all my reviews
comments
Review: Maclean, Fire and Ashes
Fire and Ashes: On the Frontlines of American Wildfire by John N. MacleanMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a collection of four essays and a "dictionary of formal and informal fire terms." One of the essays, about the Rattlesnake Fire, Maclean has expanded into River of Fire, which I have also reviewed. One is about an entrapment which did not end in tragedy, which is interesting because for once, since there are survivors instead of victims, you can find out what they were thinking. One is about Bob Sallee and the unresolvable question of where Wagner Dodge lit his fire and where Sallee and Rumsey escaped from Mann Gulch. (I'm very defensive of Norman Maclean, because Young Men and Fire is such a brilliant book, but this is a good essay.) One is an overview of American wildfire since 1910. All of the essays are competent; none of them is as good as Maclean's best writing (imho The Esperanza Fire). My favorite part of the book is honestly some of the deadpan definitions in the dictionary, e.g., twig pig: National Park Service law-enforcement ranger. (Firefighters apparently go in for their own kind of rhyming slang.)
So this is a good book, though not a great one.
View all my reviews
comments
Review: Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami
Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone by Richard Lloyd ParryMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
As it has to be, this is a very sad book. It's at once simple and very complicated. It's about the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami, particularly in the northern region of Japan called Tohoku, and particularly about Okawa Elementary School, where 74 children were killed. It is about literal ghosts, but mostly about figurative ones, and sometimes on the foggy boundary in between, about how the survivors grapple with what happened and what "going on" looks like when you've lost your entire life.
Parry is an insightful and empathetic guide to Japan's customs and culture (this is definitely written with a non-Japanese audience in mind) and how those intersect with bitter grief and anger. He can explain, for example, why it's so shocking that the parents of some of those children brought a lawsuit against the school. And he never loses sight of the fact that there are multiple sides to the story, multiple viewpoints on what the right thing to do is, at both the personal and the social level, and that there isn't one side that's "right." They're all right and they're all at least partly or possibly wrong. That's the complicated part.
The simple part is the overwhelming grief of the parents.
Highly recommended.
View all my reviews
comments
