Review: Evans, The Father of Forensics

The Father of Forensics: The Groundbreaking Cases of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, and the Beginnings of Modern CSI by Colin Evans

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Biography of Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Does what it says on the tin.

Since Spilsbury was a man consumed by his work, it's not surprising that the most interesting aspect of the book is Evans' discussion of the cases Spilsbury testified in, from George Joseph Smith (the Brides in the Bath man) and Hawley Harvey Crippen to the Wartime Ripper, Gordon Cummins. Evans writes very clearly, both about the murders and about the forensics of catching the killers, and he's very careful to include discussion of cases where Spilsbury was uncertain or wrong, to refute the image of Spilsbury as an infallible monolith. He also talks about Spilsbury's courtroom performance, how his certainty in his conclusions infected juries for thirty years.

This was a good book (four stars), but not a great book (definitely not five stars), and I'm trying to figure out what was missing. I don't know if it's that Evans' prose feels a little facile (and he uses section headers in his chapters, which, I dunno) or that for all that this is a carefully even-handed biography, it feels shallow ... there's something that could be there and isn't.



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Review: Hallcox & Welch, Bodies We've Buried

Bodies We've Buried: Inside the National Forensic Academy, the World's Top CSI Training School by Jarrett Hallcox

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm going to be perfectly honest. I did not like this book.

There's nothing wrong with it, per se, and I was very interested in its subject matter: the National Forensic Academy's 10 week CSI training program. But I developed a dislike for the authors on about page 3 and it never went away.

I want to differentiate between the authors as human beings, the flesh-and-blood people Jarrett Hallcox and Amy Welch, whom I have never met, and the authors as they present themselves (and it's "we" throughout, not Hallcox and Welch, but Hallcox-and-Welch) in the book. I don't know anything about the flesh and blood people--who by the evidence of material that made it possible for them to write this book are in fact fantastic at their job--I'm only talking about the author-construct. And I disliked the author-construct intensely by the time I was done.

They're too pleased with themselves. "Smarmy" is a harsh word, but it's not wrong. They try to be funny and mostly fail, because humor is extremely hard. There's a feeling throughout of LOOK AT US! AREN'T WE COOL! that rubbed me violently the wrong way.

So if you want to know what CSI training looks like, this is an in-depth and in fact thoughtful discussion of what and how they spend ten weeks teaching their students to do. I just wish I liked it better.



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Review: Francis, Judge Sewell's Apology

Judge Sewall's Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience by Richard Francis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a biography of Samuel Sewell, who was one of the judges in the Salem witchcraft trials. It is well-written and well-researched. I would have liked it better if it had been more about the witchcraft trials and less about Samuel Sewell, and I would have liked it better if Francis had not been so concerned to show how remarkable Sewell was, how humane he was and how idealistic, etc. etc. Francis also argues that Sewell marks the transition from allegory to psychology as a way of understanding human lives, but the problem there is that to do so, he has to pretty much ignore the entire Renaissance. Sewell IS that person for the Puritans of New England, and as such is important to the development of American thought, but in his eagerness to show how special Sewell is, Francis tends to forget that the Puritans were 100 to 200 years behind the curve here.

This is a great depiction of life in Puritan Boston around the turn of the seventeenth century, and definitely if you're interested in early American history it is well worth your time. But the subtitle: "The Salem Witch Trials and the Formation of an American Conscience": is a little bit misleading, since the book isn't interested in Salem and doesn't provide any new insights. (I was very disappointed in Francis for heading straight down the FRAUD interpretation without really much nuance.) Honestly, I found much of the day to day minutiae of Sewell's life boring rather than charming and actually FINISHED the book mostly out of pig-headedness. But a different reader will have a different experience. YMMV.



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Review: Michaud & Price, The Devil's Right Hand Man

The Devil's Right-Hand Man: The True Story of Serial Killer Robert Charles Browne by Stephen G. Michaud

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I wanted this book to be a lot better than it was.

And it wasn't BAD. It was an interesting book about the way a volunteer cold case squad in Colorado Springs coaxed serial killer Robert Charles Browne in helping them to solve one of his early murders that had only been classed as a missing persons case.

But it doesn't feel finished. Not just because there are dozens of other murders Browne claims to have committed, but because Michaud & Price published their book while several of these murders were waiting on DNA evidence. I know with the laboratory backlog, an author CAN'T wait for all the DNA to come in, but it makes this book feel rushed. Like there's some invisible deadline Michaud & Price felt they had to meet.

(I know another book about Browne just came out, Hello Charlie, but this is TEN YEARS LATER. Who the heck were Michaud & Price trying to scoop?)

So it feels rushed and superficial, like a bad documentary. (I just watched a bad History Channel documentary about the Zodiac Killer, so the comparison is easy to make.) I feel as if there's a lot more work Michaud & Price could have done, more questions they could have asked. Honestly, the sharpest and most incisive thing about this book is its title, and that's a quote from one of Browne's ex-wives.



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Review: Sanchez Romero & Schwalb, Beast

Beast: Werewolves, Serial Killers, and Man-Eaters: The Mystery of the Monsters of the Gévaudan by S.R. Schwalb

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I watched The Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) shortly after it came out (I think I mentioned it in my dissertation), and I knew it was based on something that really happened (although the movie diverges wildly and happily from reality), so I was glad to find a book that was a history of the story behind the folklore that inspired TBotW.

I would have been more glad if it had been a better book.

The first part is an imaginative account of the rampages of la Bete, including my particular hobby horse, passages from the point of view of the victims. The second part is a discussion of what la Bete (or les Betes, for there were (at least) two of them) actually was. The subtitle promises "werewolves, serial killers, and man-eaters," but there's no substantive discussion of either werewolves or serial killers, since it's perfectly obvious from the accounts of survivors and, hello, the AUTOPSIES, that la Bete was neither of those things and Sanchez Romero & Schwalb knew that going in. I find the blatant PR move more than a little annoying, especially since they weren't substantive discussions, just sort of glancing through the history of things like porphyria and lycanthropy (which is a psychiatric phenomenon where people believe that and behave like they are wolves, up to and including cannibalism). It was more retelling of folklore than anything else.

The proper discussion of what la Bete was is repetitive and for all that they lay out tables and drawings of skulls and so on, it was hard to get any sense of acumen or incisiveness out of it. (The word I'm circling is sharp, that sense of the authors knowing exactly what they want to say and how to say it. Hear No Evil may or may not be out on the lunatic fringe, but it is very sharply written.) Their consensus is that la Bete premiere, the Chazes Wolf, was in fact a massive wolf, and la Bete deuxieme, the Tenazeyre Canid, was a wolf-dog hybrid.

This isn't a very long book, but there's a lot of padding in it.



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Review: Rodriguez, The Daughters of Juarez

The Daughters of Juárez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border by Teresa Rodriguez

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This book, published in 2007, is about the skyrocketing rate of murder against women in Ciudad Juarez starting in 1993 and the horrific corruption in the police, the government, and the judiciary that caused/enabled/obfuscated the murders.

It's not a great book. It's not Rodriguez's fault that her topic is open-ended (there hadn't been, as of 2007, a single conviction in any of the murders that wasn't dubious at best) or that it is mind-bogglingly complicated. However, the same things can be said of Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone in the Dark, which I'm listening to right now and which has the added burden of being UNFINISHED and yet is excellent. Rodriguez doesn't seem to have a strong enough sense of where she wants her story to be, with the victims' families, with the police corruption, with the overarching problem of violence against women being judged unimportant by the men in power. And, yes, her story can be all of those things, but it takes some serious chops to make that kind of shift in scale from micro to macro work, and Rodriguez is an okay writer, but not the kind of powerhouse she'd need to be to pull it off. Perhaps what was lacking was the person of the author. Both McNamara and Ann Rule (whose Green River Running Red is another extremely complicated story being told on multiple levels) include themselves in the story. This isn't always necessary, or even desirable, but it gives the reader a yardstick, a little human figure to scale that keeps the horrifying numbers from receding into that muffled middle ground between the personal and the historical. And Rodriguez's numbers ARE horrifying--even more horrifying is that nobody really knows what the numbers ARE. Maybe it's that Rodriguez, after her Preface and Introduction, both of which promise a kind of sensibility that the book itself does not have, effaces her subject-position, which makes it feel, to me, like the book doesn't have any backbone--not in the sense of courage, but in the sense of a structure to hang its bones on.



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Review: McNamara, I'll Be Gone in the Dark

I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[library]
[audiobook]
Do not be put off by the cumbersome title. (Gone in the Dark would have been so much better, seriously.) This is an excellent book, and it is a terrible pity that Michelle McNamara never got to finish it. (She died of an accidental overdose of multiple drugs--"including Adderall, Xanax, Fentanyl, and amphetamines," says Wikipedia--in April 2016.)

This book is about the Golden State Killer, who was identified after McNamara's death using one of the methods that she was enthusiastic about. Even unfinished, it is a really impressive feat of true crime writing, given the sheer quantity of the GSK's crimes (at least 13 murders, more than 50 rapes, and over 100 burglaries between 1974 and 1986, and those are just the ones IDENTIFIED as him). She was trying to solve the case(s), but she was also trying to comprehend them, trying to synthesize together different crimes worked by different jurisdictions under different names (the East Area Rapist, the Original Night Stalker, the Visalia Ransacker) or under no name at all. She was looking for the pattern that would hold the GSK together, and I think she was at least beginning to find it.

The reader was okay. She did the thing that drives me nuts, where she pitched her voice up for women's dialogue and pitched it down for men, so that everyone sounds like the Cleavers, and I am like, yes, I know women's voices are higher than men's voices, LEAVE IT ALONE.

Honestly, the best read part of the whole thing was the afterword written and read by Patton Oswalt, McNamara's husband. Him, I would have enjoyed listening to for much longer.



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Review: Rosbottom, When Paris Went Dark

When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944 by Ronald C. Rosbottom

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is about the Nazi occupation of Paris and fits nicely in my Goodreads tag "dystopian nonfiction." It's well written, and Rosbottom clearly loves Paris deeply. I particularly liked the way he talked about the many secret Parises of the city, from the Metro to the hidden rooms in apartment buildings where Jews hid. It's also a book about collaboration (in the negative sense): about what that is, what it means, the imperceptible gradations along the spectrum from Vichy to the Resistance where French people had to place themselves. About what you do when the question is not abstract at all, but is present in the shape of a German officer in your favorite cafe. He also talks about the backlash after the liberation of Paris, in which people who were guilty of nothing were accused of and executed for collaboration within the span of minutes and without any impediment like a trial or even a chance to speak.

This is a book about a city, but it is also a book about how flawed human nature is.



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Review: Krakauer, Eiger Dreams

Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains by Jon Krakauer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Jon Krakauer is a brilliant writer. I bought this book basically because he wrote it and I knew that therefore I would find myself fully engaged with it, despite not being a mountain climber and not wishing to be one.

I was correct. I galloped through the book yesterday afternoon.

This is a collection of essays about mountain climbing in all its forms, from the guy who invented bouldering, to the weird ultra-fashionable world of Chamonix, to Krakauer's solo climb of the Devils Thumb in Alaska. All of the essays are excellent, from the wryly satirical "On Being Tentbound" to the tragedy of "A Bad Summer on K2" (which is an eerie foreshadowing of Krakauer's later book Into Thin Air). Krakauer writes with compassion and also with affection: he is himself a mountain climber, but he also clearly loves (and is worried by) the crazy things that human beings invent to do. And loves human beings for our invention.



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