Katherine Addison's Blog, page 24

UBC: Denton, American Massacre

American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857 by Sally Denton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is the 3rd book I've read about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the first one by a non-Mormon. In September 1857, not quite a year after the handcart disaster kicked into high gear, a wagon train of non-Mormons was massacred at Mountain Meadows, men, women, and all children over 8. Children under 8 were allowed to survive, and adopted into Mormon households, both under the assumption that they were too young to remember and under a Mormon theory about the innocence of small children. The Mormon books I've read basically sum up the wagon train as "nobody knows who they were because when they died there was nobody left to identify them"; Denton goes hunting. She can't find information about everyone, but she certainly provides biographical information that makes a mockery of the official story at the time, that these immigrants had been rude and offensive, had said they were the people who murdered Joseph Smith, that they poisoned the bodies of dead cattle, thus killing Indians (and maybe, as the story ballooned, killing Mormons, too). Denton goes one farther than the Mormon historians, who agree that the poisoning story was nonsense, and says the whole thing was nonsense, that the men leading this train had come through Utah before and knew what they were doing. The hostility in their encounters with the Mormons came from the Mormon side.

Denton also follows what happened to the surviving children as best she can, interviewing living relatives and finding family stories. She is less interested in the Mormons playing pin-the-blame-on-the-donkey, although she agrees that John Doyle Lee was betrayed and scapegoated by his surrogate father Brigham Young; although he was one of the men responsible for the massacre, he was not the only man responsible, and Brigham Young, the master of plausible deniability and the innocent air of "Who, me?", knew what was going on and did not lift a finger to stop it. Rather like Henry II, he may never have said outright that he wanted the wagon train massacred, but the people around him were adept at interpreting "will no one rid me of this turbulent priest" to "I want him dead."

(I am not a fan of Brigham Young.)

Denton is fascinating as a parallax view of what was going on in Utah in 1857, a much more skeptical eye than even Juanita Brooks. The massacre at Mountain Meadows is never going to make sense, but I think she makes as much sense out of it as can be made.



View all my reviews

comments

UBC: Roberts, Devil's Gate

Devil's Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy by David Roberts

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


So in 1856, as part of an immigration scheme, Brigham Young decided that Mormon converts coming from Europe should come to Salt Lake City by handcart, pulling their 17 lbs of personal possessions per person across the middle of the continent, from Iowa City to the Great Salt Lake.

The scheme was a disaster from the start, with poor communication, slipshod management, and a criminal failure of leadership from Brigham Young and his Apostles, who exhorted the immigrants to come to Zion without following through to be sure they wouldn't starve to death on the way. When disaster happened, as disaster was bound to, they pretended they hadn't known the parties were leaving so late in the season and, throwing Apostle Franklin Richards under the bus, Brigham Young--the master of spin and retcon, as we also see with the Mountain Meadows Massacre--pretended he HAD said they shouldn't try to make the journey so late.

This is an excellent book, tracing the set-up and the course of the disaster, and following the aftermath as far as possible given the Mormon church's general reaction to disaster, which is to smother the whole thing in silence, and given the way that the sincere faith of the survivors turned their experience from "Brigham Young hung us out to dry" to "It was God's will that we made it to Salt Lake City alive." Roberts (a non-Mormon) is respectful and thoughtful about the faith of the people involved, even while condemning the leadership of the church.

(There is a Mormon Handcart Historic Site, where you can go and try pulling a handcart for yourself. From Roberts' experience of trying to do it solo, I advise you take some friends.)



View all my reviews

comments

UBC: Lower, Hitler's Furies

Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[donated to library]

Wow, this is an excellent book. It's about women's place in the genocidal machinery of Hitler's empire in eastern Europe, and how that place is almost impossible to recover, because it's the history of support staff, to whom--of course--nobody pays attention. (The audiobook reader is also excellent.)

Lower tracks individual nurses, secretaries, teachers, and wives, uncovering evidence of their roles as witnesses, accomplices, and perpetrators. Concentration camp guards are not the only women who participated in the Holocaust. Since I was just reading about Irma Grese in Vronsky's Women Serial Killers, it was easy to make the comparison and see that these women who killed Jews unofficially were every bit as horrendous as the Beast of Belsen. (Wikipedia tells me Grese was also known as the Hyena of Auschwitz.)

But because their crimes weren't documented, and because West German courts did not consider eyewitness testimony sufficiently credible to warrant conviction (eyewitness testimony of the caliber of "I saw her pick up a child and kill it by beating it against the wall of the ghetto" or "I saw her lure children to her with candy and then shoot them in the mouth")--and because "denazification" was so woefully incomplete in Germany and Austria--most of them simply slipped away, back into anonymity.

Lower's is a Herculean task, and she does it very very well.



View all my reviews

comments

UBC: Roach, Stiff

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

[audiobook]
[library]
( Read more... )

comments

UBC: Vronsky, Female Serial Killers

Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters by Peter Vronsky

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

comments

UBC: Geary, The Mystery of Mary Rogers

The Mystery of Mary Rogers by Rick Geary

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This graphic novel may be the best book I have yet read about the mysterious death of Mary Rogers. Geary's black and white art is charming (I know that's a funny word to use in this context, but honestly, I was charmed by his art even when he was drawing dead bodies); he's done his homework; and he does something most books about this case don't do: he stays concerned with what happened to Mary Cecilia Rogers? from start to finish. I greatly appreciate that in an author.

I believe The Beautiful Cigar Girl (Daniel Stashower) is the book to go to if you're interested in what was going on with Poe and "The Mystery of Marie Roget." Stashower's done some serious digging into Poe's literary biography, and I believe has a more accurate picture. But as a book about the murder of Mary Rogers, Geary's is excellent. He even provides theories about what happened that do a better job of making sense of the evidence than do any of the theories put forward at the time (including Poe's). And he never loses sight of Mary herself.



View all my reviews

comments

UBC: Higdon, Leopold & Loeb

Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century by Hal Higdon

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

comments

UBC: Rule, The Want-Ad Killer

The Want-Ad Killer by Ann Rule

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


[library]

This book is about the abominable Harvey Louis Carignan (who is STILL ALIVE, he is ninety). It is a perfectly competent recounting of his crimes & trials, nothing wrong with it at all. I don't recommend the audio book, as OVer emPHAtic READer is [breathless pause] OVer emPHAtic, but this is certainly a clear, concise summary of Harvey Carignan as a serial killer.



View all my reviews

comments

Essay up at Uncanny

"How to Make a Witch-Hunt: Salem 1692."

comments

UBC: Guinn, The Road to Jonestown

The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple by Jeff Guinn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I read this book in a kind of mesmerized revulsion; Guinn does an excellent job conveying the contradictory nature of his subject--Jim Jones was simultaneously a passionate social reformer and a self-absorbed narcissist, a man who genuinely cared about the poor and downtrodden and a cynical conman who would bilk them out of every remaining penny they had. Peoples Temple (no article, no apostrophe) was both a glowingly idealistic socialist movement in the actual best sense of the word . . . and a doomsday cult. It's the contradiction that maintains a sense of cognitive dissonance; Jones was a demagogue, but as Guinn points out, he was a demagogue who appealed to people's best instincts, instead of their worst. I kept trying to make the paradox resolve, and it kept refusing to do so.

All I had known about Peoples Temple was the mass murder-suicide in Guyana--I hadn't even known that there was a name for them besides "Jonestown"--so I was fascinated by the details of what Peoples Temple was, just as I was horrified by the details of what Jones, having created it, proceeded to turn it into. And the way in which people who should have known better let him do it, because they believed in the same ideals he did.

The next time someone tries to tell you the ends justify the means, tell them to look at the Reverend Jim Jones.



View all my reviews

comments