Katherine Addison's Blog, page 30

UBC: Rosner, The Anatomy Murders

The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh's Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes by Lisa Rosner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[library]

Up the close & down the stair / But & ben wi' Burke & Hare / Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief / And Knox the boy that buys the beef.
--Anonymous doggerel

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PATREON

MY PATREON IS LIVE.

As other people have said, do not think that $1 is an insignificant contribution. Dollars add up, and more than that, every person who makes that donation is telling me that they want me to keep telling stories. That's incredibly important.

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PSA: Patreon

I am launching a Patreon on Tuesday. If you have suggestions about patron rewards, I would love to hear them.

(N.b., my book reviews will still go up at Goodreads and here, all content currently in the dreamwidth archive will stay there, and I will not be abandoning this blog, although the content may be mostly political for a while fuck you 2017.)

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UBC: Hollandsworth, The Midnight Assassin

The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer by Skip Hollandsworth

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
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UBC: Keppel, Signature Killers

Signature Killers by Robert D. Keppel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


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UBC: Preston (and Spezi), The Monster of Florence [audio]

The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


[library]

Okay, so I'm going to start with something catty, for which I apologize, but it also serves as a pretty good tl;dr:

This book would be greatly improved by about 80% less Douglas Preston and a concomitant 80% more Mario Spezi.

I am NOT INTERESTED in Preston's story of the American naif whose romantic vision of Florence is ripped apart by his investigation of the Monster of Florence. This is a tired old plot--John Clute dissects it in The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror--and I don't think it works very well in nonfiction. It's so obviously a story about the blindness of privilege and Preston so completely fails to come to grips with the way he forces his friends into the roles he imagines their identities to be that I find it mostly a frustrating scaffold around the actual story. I am especially not interested in all the name-dropping and subtextual bragging about his obvious wealth. (Dude can afford to drop everything and move to Florence with his wife and two children on (a) a whim and (b) a moment's notice. This is a guy who is not worrying about his car payments, let's just leave it at that.) But ultimately, I just DON'T CARE about the perspective of a wealthy American bourgeois who waltzes into the story 40 years after its murky beginnings and foregrounds HIS anagnoresis & collateral angst over the story of either (a) Il Mostro & his victims or (b) the story of Mario Spezi, the Italian journalist who has been writing about Il Mostro since 1974, and who was actually arrested and imprisoned for his pursuit of the truth. (Preston was interrogated & threatened ... and allowed to leave Italy. Not quite the same.) I would be much more interested in a translation of Spezi's collected writings about Il Mostro, or even in a translation of the book Preston & Spezi wrote in Italian, Dolci colline di sangue--it's not the same as The Monster of Florence, since part of TMoF takes place around the publication of Dcds--possibly TMoF is just an expansion/translation of Dcds, but since Spezi gets equal billing in Dcds & is only a "with" for TMoF, I have some doubts. If Preston clarified this point in TMoF, I missed it.

LEAVING THAT ASIDE (and again I apologize for being catty), the story of Il Mostro di Fiorenze is trainwreck-fascinating, both the brutal unsolved murders and the absolutely lunatic theories of the official investigations and the terrible terrible damage they have done and continue to do to innocent people. Preston says, both in the book and in the vapid interview that was a bonus feature at the end of the audiobook, that he doesn't think the case will ever be solved, and I understand that belief. Unless Il Mostro himself confesses (and by now he may very well be dead), the truth may be hopelessly buried beneath conspiracy theories about organ-harvesting Satanists.

As I'm sure you're learning to expect from my reviews of audiobooks, I once again was driven nearly to distraction by the reader. He was so excellent for the most part that I was stupidly surprised that that's not what Douglas Preston actually sounds like, but whenever he was reading quotes (in English) from Italian speakers, whether they were speaking English to Americans, speaking Italian to Americans, or speaking Italian to other Italians, he used an Italian accent, complete with nasal sing-song, that was distracting as all fuck and just NOT NECESSARY. It's not like we're going to forget that the story is set in Florence or that everyone except Preston is Italian.



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Letter to Senator Johnson: Nazis are evil edition

Dear Senator Johnson:

I am very disturbed by your reaction to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, August 11-12. You made a statement condemning "hate and violence" initially, but since then, you seem determined to make everyone forget that the rally ever happened, that white men carrying Nazi flags, making Nazi salutes, and chanting Nazi slogans marched through an American city--and that a woman is dead because one of them thought he could get away with ramming his car into a crowd of counter-protesters in broad daylight.

What's even worse is your reaction to President Trump's appalling speech. You have said you "don't think" Trump is a racist, although you can't offer any reasons for that belief, and the most negative thing you have yet said about his speech is that "it didn't move us closer. It certainly didn't put the issue behind us."

Senator, it's not clear to me what you think the "issue" is.

You have not spoken out against the racism of the rally. You have not condemned the white nationalist principles of its organizers. You haven't even gone so far as to say that you are anti-fascist. This isn't hard, Senator. "Nazis are evil" is not a complicated or difficult concept. And yet it's one you don't seem to grasp.

You want us to "put the divisive issues off to the side" and "accentuate the positive." By which you mean, you want there to be no consequences of this Nazi terrorist action. You want those of us who are not white men to, once again, swallow the insult and injury offered to us because we are being "divisive" by pointing out that these alt-right Nazis want us dead and are demonstrably ready and willing to kill us themselves.

That's what the fuss is about, Senator. That's why some of us are so unreasonable as to not yet be ready to "put the issue behind us."

Moreover, your call for unity is alarming. I'm willing to extend you the benefit of the doubt--perhaps you genuinely don't know this--but the root of the word fascism, and the concept at the movement's core, is the fasces, the bundle of sticks that is stronger together than any one stick would be by itself. Fascists are all about unity, and when you call for "unity" in the wake of a fascist attack, and when it is clear that by "unity" what you mean is that non-whites and non-males need to sit down, shut up, and stop rocking the boat, I think a person is justified in wondering what you, yourself, think about fascism.

So that's my question to you, Senator. Are you pro- or anti-fascist? It's a very simple question, requiring only a one sentence answer.

I eagerly await your public response.


[ETA: I have emailed this letter to Senator Johnson, and will send a hard copy tomorrow. Plus I have sent a shortened version of this letter both to my tiny local paper and to the Capital Times.]

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UBC: Schiff, The Witches [audio]

The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[library]

To get it out of the way, I hated the audio book reader. HATED. She sounded like a local TV news reporter doing a "human interest" story (smugly supercilious, like she finds it all too precious for words), and she had this way of pronouncing sixteen ninety-two that drove me UP THE WALL ("Sixteen ninedy-twoo" is the best rendering I can give; it made me understand why non-Americans can find American accents grating.) When quoting anyone's testimony, she over-emphasized and poured sincerity over the words like maple syrup over pancakes, making everyone sound like Gertrude, who doth protest too much. And The Witches is a VERY LONG book, so I was trapped with this woman's voice for a VERY LONG TIME. (I would have stopped, except that I sincerely wanted to hear the book, moreso than I wanted to get away from ther reader's voice, but it was sometimes a very close call.)

Okay. Aside from that.

This is really an excellent book on the Salem witchcraft-crisis. I don't agree with Schiff at all points (e.g., she's clearly following Breslaw in her assessment of Tituba's testimony, and I don't agree that that's the tipping point of the crisis), but she has done something that no one else writing on Salem has done, and it's something that needed doing. Schiff traces the relationships between the participants and she traces the history of those relationships back from the 1690s to the 1680s to the 1670s. Boyer and Nussbaum made a start at this sort of analysis in Salem:Possessed, but Schiff demonstrates how limited their analysis was, as she examines the web of relationships between afflicted persons, accused witches, judges, ministers, all the way up and down the social ladder from the indigent Sarah Good to the governor of the colony, Sir William Phips. This is a researcher's tour de force, and Schiff is a good, clear writer whose explanations are easy to follow, even when heard instead of read.

My biggest quibble with her is the same quibble I have with almost all scholars who write about Salem. She ends up making it sound like the entire thing was a series of nested frauds rather than the result of anyone's genuine belief in witches and witchcraft. I've talked about this in other reviews, how to a modern reader, it seems almost impossible that it could be anything but fraud and how hard-bordering-on-impossible it is for us to understand, much less enter into, the Puritan worldview, their sincere belief that they were at the center of the cosmic struggle between Go(o)d and (D)evil (sorry, can't resist the wordplay) and their sincere belief that the Devil was real and walking in New England. Puritanism was a culture that enshrined delusions of persecution/grandeur and in that culture witchcraft made sense in a literal way it doesn't in ours. And some of it was fraud. Some of the afflicted persons confessed as much. But fraud alone did not kill twenty-five people (19 were hanged, 1 pressed to death, 5 died in prison, 2 of them infants), and that's the weak spot in Schiff's otherwise excellent book.



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UBC: Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice [audio]

In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


[library]

This was extremely entertaining, and taught me a great deal about the WACKED-OUT science of the late 19th century, with its paleocrystic seas and thermal gateways. It also provides excellent competence porn, as George De Long, his chief engineer George Melville, and the ship's doctor James Ambler were all insanely good at their jobs, and had plenty of opportunities to show it in the two years the U.S.S. Jeannette was trapped in the Arctic pack ice. (There's a fabulous piece of CSI: Jeannette as Dr. Ambler tracked down the cause of the lead poisoning that was slowly killing the crew.) 20 of the 33 members of the crew, including De Long, died in Siberia after exhibiting more epic heroism than should have been allowed to end in failure (but history, unlike fiction, does not care about your heroism), and the Jeannette's voyage remains eclipsed by the Erebus and the Terror

Trigger warning: aside from the ghastly deaths of De Long, Ambler, and most of the crew, horrible and cruel things happen to sled dogs, polar bears, and innumerable Arctic birds.

The audio book reader was competent and mostly a pleasure to listen to, except for his habit of raising the pitch of his voice when quoting women's writing and lowering the pitch of his voice when quoting men. This makes all the men sound excessively MANLY, and makes Emma De Long sound like a simpering idiot, when it's clear she was anything but.



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UBC: Reis, Damned Women

Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England by Elizabeth Reis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I hate starting a review with "this book was meh," but . . . this book was meh.

Reis' thesis is that in seventeenth-century Puritan New England, when everyone was obsessed with scrutinizing their souls for signs of damnation or salvation, and when a central event in a person's life was likely to be their conversion testimony (you stand up in front of the church you want to join and tell the church members how you came to realize that (a) you were a sinful crawling worm and (b) God had chosen you to be among the Elect regardless), while men tended to say that their sinful actions corrupted their souls, women were much more likely to say that their corrupted souls led them to sinful actions. She talks about how this led (or might have led) to women's confessions of witchcraft--if you view sin as a continuum, and if your corrupted soul means you cannot deny that you are sinful at heart, then how can you be certain that you aren't a witch?

Reis proves her thesis, and it's a subject I'm quite interested in, but the book itself just . . . meh. It was a book. I read it. If you're researching the subject either of Puritan witchcraft or the experience of Puritan women, it's definitely worth reading. Otherwise, not so much.



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