WORLD S GREATEST TRUE CRIME

by Colin Wilson (editor)

Part 1-World Famous Gangsters Part 2-World Famous Robberies Part 3-Swindles and Hoaxes Part 4-Scandals

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction, Crime

452 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Colin Henry Wilson was born and raised in Leicester, England, U.K. He left school at 16, worked in factories and various occupations, and read in his spare time. When Wilson was 24, Gollancz published The Outsider (1956) which examines the role of the social 'outsider' in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures. These include Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James, T. E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh and Wilson discusses his perception of Social alienation in their work. The book was a best seller and helped popularize existentialism in Britain. Critical praise though, was short-lived and Wilson was soon widely criticized.

Wilson's works after The Outsider focused on positive aspects of human psychology, such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. He admired the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow and corresponded with him. Wilson wrote The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff on the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff and an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic in 1980. He argues throughout his work that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. Wilson views normal, everyday consciousness buffeted by the moment, as "blinkered" and argues that it should not be accepted as showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us from being completely immersed in wonder, or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. Wilson believes that our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness are as real as our experiences of angst and, since we are more fully alive at these moments, they are more real. These experiences can be cultivated through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work.

Reviews

[allother · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting tales of crime through history

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that is not so much written by an author, but is edited in several sections by several men.

- It starts off with mobsters and the mafia;
- moves through gin crime and other crimes in 18th and 19th Century;
- has a section on the Wild West and why bandits weren’t all that likeable after all;
- moves through the slew of hoaxes and frauds that emerged in the late 19th century and through the 20th century , with fake biographies, false gurus and outright liars;
- and it ends with the royal and political scandals of the last century.

It’s important to note that this is not a well written book, but it is well researched. It is also quite outdated, being written in 1993 and not sufficiently updated even though my edition was published in 2001. This is significant in the light of the various films that have been released on these stories in the past 13 years (the authors refer to popular media depictions) including the Aviator, the capture of Biggs, the death of both the Krays and the death of John Profumo. (Okay, I mentioned the last to see if you’re concentrating – he only died March this year and this couldn’t possibly feature in the book :0))

But it’s a great compendium of facts and trivia ad I’m really glad I read it. It’s made me quite keen to go on to other biographies and autobiographies now and that makes me happy.