Review: O'Brien, Blood Runs Green

Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago by Gillian O'Brien

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a well-written and interesting book about the murder of Dr. P. H. Cronin, yet another Crime of the Century that no one's ever heard of. Cronin's murder is inextricably bound up in the affairs of the Clan na Gael, so I learned a great deal about Irish Republicanism in Gilded Age Chicago. (I already knew about Gilded Age corruption, but this did certainly provide a number of new examples.) O'Brien is very good at examining and explaining ramifications, both in the causes of Cronin's murder and in the consequences, and she keeps track the whole time of how the Chicago newspapers both reported the news and sometimes created the news they were reporting.



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Review: Vowell, Assassination Vacation

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[audiobook]
[library]

This is the first time I've finished an audiobook and gone back to the beginning to listen to it again. I loved this book. It hits my historical true crime buttons; it's also well-written and thoughtful. Vowell is always studying her own project and its implications even as she's tracking down obscure sites with connections to the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Also, I appreciate her sense of humor and the way she owns her own morbid geekery.

Vowell is the reader for the audiobook (with guest appearances by a wide and surprising variety of people), and once I got used to her voice and her timing, I became entirely on board with that choice. This is also the first time where the experience of listening to the audiobook has not been a second-best to reading the book on paper (although I am going to look for a paper copy as well).



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Review: Galvin, Old Sparky

Old Sparky: The Electric Chair and the History of the Death Penalty by Anthony Galvin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


History of the electric chair. Badly copy-edited and mostly surface-y, facile, and kind of gossipy in tone, except for the last chapter where he talks about what happens when executions go wrong, both for the electric chair and for lethal injection. That chapter was horrifying, but also the most interesting chapter in the book.



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Review: Kaufman, Skull in the Ashes

Skull in the Ashes: Murder, a Gold Rush Manhunt, and the Birth of Circumstantial Evidence in America by Peter Kaufman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Iowan Frank Novak tries the classic fake-your-own-death scam by burning down his general store with somebody else's body prepped to be found in the ashes with Novak's personal belongings. His first crucial mistake was in not getting rid of the CORPSE's personal belongings--the victim's sister identified the shirt he was wearing--and then he was unlucky enough to have a fantastically dogged detective named Cassius Claud "Red" Perrin put on his trail. I became very fond of Red Perrin as he tracked his quarry to gold-rush Alaska and brought him back, and the book was generally fascinating and a good read.



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Review: Brands, The Murder of Jim Fisk

The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield: A Tragedy of the Gilded Age by H.W. Brands

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Well-written and entertaining "popular history" account of the murder of Jim Fisk by the lover of one of his former mistresses. Not the place to go for in-depth analysis of anything, but gives a good portrait of the Gilded Age.



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Review: Lessard, The unArchitect of Desire

The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family by Suzannah Lessard

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Memoir of the great-granddaughter of Stanford White, the great Beaux-Arts architect murdered in a theater he himself designed by the husband of one of his former mistresses. Lessard writes beautifully about architecture and place and family, but I think she rushes the ending.



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Review: Marks, And Die in the West

And Die in the West: The Story of the O.K. Corral Gunfight by Paula Mitchell Marks

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"Magisterial" is probably the correct adjective for this account of the gunfight at (near) the O. K. Corral. It's also fair to call it a history of Tombstone, for Marks compiles a variety of sources to give a panoramic view of the causes for the gunfight and its aftermath,. Later scholars take issue with some of her assessments of the Earps and J. H. Holliday, but this is still an excellent history/overview of why what happened in Tombstone happened. And I appreciate the fact that Marks is not impressed by Wyatt Earp.



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Review: Vowell, The Partly CLoudy Patriot

The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Collection of short pieces: essays and reviews on a variety of subjects, but as the title suggests, America--both the idea and the reality--remains central throughout. Vowell is sharp and funny and has a gift for seeing things from odd angles. She has a great essay, for instance, on Tom Cruise, "Tom Cruise Makes Me Nervous," where she says, "Tom Cruise is the most talented actor of all time at keeping his distance" (128) which I think is a beautiful summation.

Because her writing seems always to criss-cross the verge of memoir, there's continuity with Assassination Vacation (the nephew who is three in AV is 7 months in TPCP), which contributes to the charming and sometimes disquieting sense that Vowell is truly baring her soul, telling us, her readers, things she can't tell anyone else. Telling secrets publicly is, after all, what memoir is for. Not always bad secrets or earth-shattering secrets, just the secrets about how the memoirist felt at a particular moment, what she thinks about when she's alone--all the things that we DON'T tell other people, but can tell a world-ful of faceless strangers. (I don't talk about my true crime obsession much with the people around me. I talk about it with you.)

Knowing that she works in radio and having listened to AV twice, I think that part of what makes Vowell a great essayist is her literal voice: the way she delivers her own sentences. I enjoyed TPCP (except for the eerie sense of deja vu in watching her angst about George W.'s administration and thinking, oh honey. Because, wow, yes, Dubya was a terrible, war criminal, deeply stupid president and, yes, I think he cheated Gore, so in some ways, Trump really is the repetition of history that those who do not study it are doomed to. Only they forgot to mention it's worse the second time around.), but I have the sneaking sensation I would have enjoyed it more with Sarah Vowell reading it to me.



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Review: Gonzales, Surviving Survival

Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience by Laurence Gonzales

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is essentially a sequel to DEEP SURVIVAL, asking a question I'm always interested in: what happens after the story is over? After the drama and the catastrophe and the triumph of the protagonist over impossible odds . . . what happens next? I'm interested in this in fiction, but also interested in the same question in real life: how do people deal with HAVING SURVIVED?

Gonzales examines a number of case studies, some from his own interviews, some from books that the survivors have written, some from both. None of his conclusions is terribly surprising, but it's good to see them written down: stay engaged with the world, look for humor, find ways to help other people. (Altruism seems to be a remarkably powerful tool for helping human beings adapt to their situation.)

Gonzales is an excellent writer, and SURVIVING SURVIVAL is an extremely readable book. It lacks the teeth of DEEP SURVIVAL, which was as much about why people die in crisis situations as about why they live, and had the added scarlet thread of Gonzales' own obsession (which you can see as a virtue or a defect, depending), but if you're interested in the question he's asking--for personal reasons or otherwise--it is well worth the read.

Gonzales also earns extra points from me for not falling into one of the traps that Sherwood fell into in THE SURVIVORS CLUB. Gonzales' stories are not simplistic triumphs and they don't all end happily. He recognizes that survival, like other phases of life, is both joyful and sad, funny and painful. He's very clear that after surviving a catastrophe (crocodile attack, shark attack, bear attack, husband attack . . . and I sound like I'm being glib there, but I'm not: two of his survivors are women who came very close to being killed by their husbands), the survivor can't go back. Things can't be the way they were before. They can only be the way they're going to be now.



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Review: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst

The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Tomalin & Hall were both reporters who covered the story, and their book came out in 1970; give how close they were to the story, I think it's a very fair and even-handed account. They don't sympathize at all with Crowhurst's fraud, but they do empathize with the way he becomes more and more tightly trapped by the consequences of his own actions, and with the reasons he started down this terrible path in the first place. They do an excellent job of using their primary sources--Crowhurst's log books and associated papers and the abandoned Teignmouth Electron herself--to piece together the story of what happened while Crowhurst was pretending he was sailing 'round the world, and there's something brilliantly calm and rational about the way that they explore the written evidence of Crowhurst's psychotic break. I've read this book twice and probably need to own a copy so I can keep rereading it on occasion.



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Review: Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen

A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Nichols, himself a single-handed yachtsman, does a great job of examining the voyages of all nine men; he focuses, logically, on the men who completed or came closest to completing the voyage--Robin Knox-Johnston (the winner); Nigel Tetley, whose boat sank under him; Bernard Moitessier, who abandoned the race to keep sailing; and of course Donald Crowhurst--but he's interested in everyone's story (he won my heart forever by telling me the names of all the yachts), and he's a good, vivid writer who understands how to capture the life of a small sailing boat. He also points to the history and community of solo circumnavigations and single-handed yachting in general--a context for the race that outsiders (e.g., Tomalin & Hall's excellent The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst) don't write about.



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