Katherine Addison's Blog, page 23

UBC: Hagen, we is got him

We Is Got Him: The Kidnapping that Changed America by Carrie Hagen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a better book about the Ross kidnapping than Zierold's Little Charley Ross, but it is not a substantially different book. Hagen doesn't have any new information, although she does offer a better analysis of the political response to Charley Ross' kidnapping and she does have a theory about what happened to him that is perfectly plausible, at least arguably supported by the evidence, and greatly advantageous in that it offers both an explanation and a resolution for Charley Ross' complete and utter disappearance. But of course none of that means that it is correct.

She makes no attempt to analyze, or even come to terms with, the bizarre ransom letters (even though she uses them for her chapter headers and the title of her book), which is definitely a weakness in the book, but if you're interested in the history of kidnapping for ransom in America, or in unsolved missing persons cases, or just in the particular kidnapping of Charles Brewster Ross, age 4 and never seen again, this is a good place to start.



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UBC: Prothero & Smith, Defending Gary

Defending Gary: Unraveling the Mind of the Green River Killer by Mark Prothero

My rating: 5 of 5 stars( Read more... )

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UBC: a pair of Georgian murders

Cooke, Elizabeth. The Damnation of John Donellan.

The murder of Sir Theodosius Broughton--or maybe the not-murder of SIr Theodosius Broughton, since Cooke's speculation that he was (a) epileptic, (b) killing himself with quack medicines (18th century "cures" for syphilis all involve great quantities of mercury), or (c) both, seems not unreasonable--and the question of who did it. Did John Donellan kill his 20 year old brother in law, or did Sir Theodosius' mother kill him? Since everything we've got is documents from 1780 when neither forensic science nor medical science was even invented yet, all Cooke can do is speculate (and I don't buy all of her speculations), but she certainly raises enough reasonable doubt to make it clear that Donellan should not have been convicted and hanged for his brother-in-law's death.

Borowitz, Albert. The Thurtell-Hunt Murder Case.

This is an excellent no-frills nuts-and-bolts discussion of the murder of William Weare by John Thurtell and a couple of his friends. There's no doubt involved here (Thurtell shot Weare, cut his throat, and actually killed him by shoving the barrel of the gun through his skull), except in the degree of involvement of Joseph Hunt and William Probert, both of whom gave accounts of the murder that threw the blame exceedingly hard at the other guy. Borowitz is comprehensive, a little dry, but not "academic" (by which I mean unnecessarily polysyllabic and difficult to read--if it was academic without the sarcastic quote-marks, I would mean something else). If you're interested in Regency England at all, this is full of details about daily life and the Fancy (boxing) and the odd workings of the justice system.

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UBC: French, Midnight in Peking

Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent book, about the murder of a young Englishwoman in Peking in 1937, and the failure of the official investigation, caught between the rock of Chinese corruption and the hard place of British determination to squelch all scandal, and then about the quite remarkable investigation conducted by the young woman's father (then in his seventies) and the solution he discovered. It makes an interesting pair with People Who Eat Darknessbeing foreign) and about falling through the cracks.

Also about what happens to young women who cross the paths of men who think they have the inalienable right to take whatever they want.



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UBC: Colquhoun, Did She Kill Him?

Did She Kill Him?: A Victorian Tale of Deception, Adultery, and Arsenic by Kate Colquhoun

My rating: 4 of 5 stars( Read more... )

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UBC: Schrager, The Sixteenth Rail

The Sixteenth Rail: The Evidence, the Scientist, and the Lindbergh Kidnapping by Adam Schrager

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I'm wary of books about the Lindbergh kidnapping, but this one is focused on Arthur Koehler (pronounced KAY-lerr), who is rightly called the father of forensic botany, and his work on Hauptmann's terrible ladder. The way Koehler worked backwards from the finished ladder to the origins of the rungs and rails is fascinating, especially--of course--the 16th rail, which is the one that came from Hauptmann's attic.

Schrager is honest about the inconsistencies between Koehler's reports and his trial testimony (could he or could he not determine that it was a three-quarters inch chisel, for example) and the opinions of modern tool mark experts that Koehler couldn't have known with certainty the things he claimed he knew. I'm a little dubious about the tool mark experts, because if Koehler COULDN'T follow the trail left by the tool marks in the way that he did, then there are some whopping coincidences involved in getting him to the right answer (I'm willing to believe Hauptmann wasn't the only kidnapper, much less willing to believe he was an innocent framed lamb, And Schrager does convince me that Koehler would not have participated in a frame-up.)

This is not a great book--it's hagiographic and the prose is not better than adequate--but it was well worth the read.



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UBC: Burleigh & Wippermann, The Racial State

The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 by Michael Burleigh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars( Read more... )

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UBC: Dawson, Death in the Air

Death in the Air: The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City by Kate Winkler Dawson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a pretty good book about the lethal London fog of 1952 (estimated 12,000 deaths attributable to the fog and, no, I did not mistype that) welded to an okay-ish book about the serial killer John Reginald Christie in that structure that's become so popular lately of "Phenomenon A + Murderer B = Book C." This can work well, and I've seen it done, but not in this book. There's no particular connection between Christie and the fog except that he was living in London in 1952. He did not kill anyone during the fog; he did not pick his victims based on some weird fog criterion. He suffocated, or partially suffocated, some of them with coal gas, but as a connection between him and the deadly London particulars, that's pretty weak. Dawson doesn't really have any new insights to offer into Christie or his murders or his horrible habit of keeping his victims close to him (under the floorboards, in the garden, in a plastered over cupboard), and while I thought what she had to say about the fog--and about the way that the Conservative government dealt (badly) with the fog and the inconvenient implications of the fog (air pollution kills people! oh dear)--was interesting, it was weakened by being one of two foci of attention instead of being alone at center stage.

I also personally dislike the structure of "find Everypersons X, Y, and Z and follow them through Phenomenon A and its aftermath." Again, it can be done well, but it's too easy to do, not even badly, but mediocre-ly, and Dawson certainly doesn't do it much better than mediocre-ly. Her Everypersons don't connect with each other, they don't connect with the government, they don't connect with Christie. If you're going to try to write a book using an artificial structure, go big or go home. Find ways to make your assemblage into a story, or what's the use of making the assemblage in the first place?

I think, although I admit I am not sure, that Dawson was primarily interested in the fog and saw Christie as a way to make the book more marketable, because that's what serial killers do for popular history. I, of course, was primarily interested in Christie (although boy howdy did I learn a lot about London fogs, which is not irrelevant to anyone who loves Sherlock Holmes), and if you're writing about Christie as Murderer B, your best Phenomenon A is the death penalty, since the vexed and unanswerable question of Tim Evans' guilt or innocence has a lot to do with why there is no death penalty in Britain any more. Were there two murderers living at 10 Rillington Place? It seems so unlikely, and yet the deaths of Beryl and Geraldine Evans don't fit Christie's pattern. He raped and murdered women he brought home from pubs, not his neighbor and her little girl. And Tim Evans himself manifestly and literally could not tell the truth to save his life. None of his versions of what happened to Beryl and Geraldine makes sense. And Christie's versions aren't any better.

I think it's more likely than not that Tim Evans murdered his wife and daughter and it's just a ghastly coincidence that he was living upstairs from a serial killer at the time. But I don't know.

So this was an interesting book, and certainly not a bad book, but it could have been a much better book if it had been about either the fog or the serial killer.



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UBC: Klemperer, Lingua Tertii Imperii

Language of the Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii by Victor Klemperer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is what happens when a Jewish philologist takes up a project to keep from going insane under Nazi rule. It is
amazing
.

Klemperer was a Jew married to an "Aryan" woman who refused to give him up. So he spent the years of the Third Reich in Dresden, working in a factory instead of a university, living in a "Jews' House," being harassed by the Gestapo, forbidden to read any books written by Aryans. . . and to keep himself sane, he started what today we would call #LTI: notes in his diary about the Lingua Tertii Imperii, the way Nazis used language, and the way their use of language infected and corrupted the German language as a whole.

This is a brilliant book. His observations about language always lead back to the society he's living in, the oppression he's suffering under, the way ordinary Germans behaved (along a sliding spectrum of anti-Semitism), the way the Gestapo thugs behaved, the character of Goebbels as revealed in his speeches . . . thousands of tiny details that even the best social history of the Third Reich can't offer, because this is a man observing and analyzing from ground zero.

I tend to prefer secondary sources to primary sources (I feel this is a terrible character flaw, but there it is), but Klemperer is both. He's analyzing his own experiences as they happen to him, analyzing his own reactions, and always digging at words, the words people use, the words people don't use, the way metaphors influence the way people think.

This reprint was published by Bloomsbury in 2013 (in a TERRIBLE sans serif font which I hate with a cold and venomous hatred), so it's still readily available. I got it from Amazon. If you are interested in the Holocaust, in Nazi Germany, or in linguistics, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.



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UBC twofer: Geary, The Bloody Benders; Madeleine Smith

The Saga of the Bloody Benders by Rick Geary

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a well-researched charmingly drawn and carefully impartial account of the Bender family (who may not have been a family and may not have been named Bender), who set up an inn in Kansas in 1870 so that they could murder their customers for their cash, valuables, horses, wagons, and anything else they happened to have. I always think, reading about the Benders, that somebody must have invented them, they're too perfectly horrible to be real. But they were real, and nobody knows what happened to them. Geary does a fantastic job.



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The Case of Madeleine Smith by Rick Geary

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


All the usual superlatives for Geary's work, plus he captures the fascination of the did she or didn't she? beautifully. Madeleine Smith may or may not have poisoned her lover in 1857. The jury at her trial came back with the Scottish verdict "Not proven," which is like the perfect commentary on the case. Madeleine had all the motive in the world to kill Emile l'Angelier, and she was proved to have purchased arsenic (for cosmetic purposes! no really!), but the prosecution could not prove that she met Emile on the night that he died. Geary traces the progress of Madeleine and Emile's relationship, the ins and outs of the trial, and then what happened to Madeleine afterwards (she moved to London, married, and became a prominent Fabian; after her first husband died, she moved to New York, married again, and died at the age of 92 in 1928). Geary does such a beautiful job.



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