Review: Eakin, A Race Too Far

This is the other book about the 1968/9 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race (along with A Voyage for Madmen and The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst). It is in fact, in capsule summary, A Voyage for Madmen with interviews. Eakin doesn't have anything new to say about the race, but he's tracked down all the participants that are still living and are willing to be interviewed (John Ridgway declined), and he's done extensive interviews with Eve Tetley, Francoise Moitessier, and Clare and Simon Crowhurst. So the book was interesting for the different perspectives it offers (Clare Crowhurst loathes The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst) and it does give a better sense of the devastation that Crowhurst (fraud and suicide) Tetley (died two years later under very mysterious circumstances), and Moitessier (fucked off to Tahiti and screwed his wife over financially) left behind them, but I think A Voyage for Madmen is a better book.

Review: Goss & Behe, Lost at Sea

Lost At Sea: Ghost Ships and Other Mysteries by Michael Goss

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is SO WEIRD.

It starts out as a discussion of folklore--the Flying Dutchman and so forth--and there's a fascinating couple of chapters about submarines, and then it takes a sudden HARD left into paranormal and psychic phenomena surrounding shipwrecks. Granted that much of the folklore is about ghosts, I still feel like I only barely kept on the road through the turn. It continued to be fascinating, but in a quite different way. They went from stories about shipwrecks to what I guess you might call testimony about shipwrecks. And they ended with the Queen Mary, which is notoriously haunted (I've seen that terrible episode of Unsolved Mysteries) but not a shipwreck at all.

It's a very well written and engaging book; I don't entirely mind that it changed projects in the middle, because I continued to be engaged by it, but either they had a couple of different books that they just sort of smooshed together into one, or their original intentions got hijacked by the Titanic (Behe is the VP of the Titanic Historical Society, so there's a degree to which that's not surprising, either).

Full confession: I loved this book all the way through, because it's weird and morbid and full of ghost stories, but I recognize my own biases here. Nevertheless, five stars.



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Review: Davis, Defending the Damned

Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago's Cook County Public Defender's Office by Kevin A. Davis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book is about the Cook County Public Defender's Office Murder Task Force, i.e., the lawyers who defend indigent murder suspects. Davis interviews a number of the lawyers, who tell him stories of their worst and best cases, and he follows one case, the shooting of Officer Eric Lee, from beginning to as much of an end as it looks likely to have, which is basically a giant question mark. It's not even certain that the man convicted of Lee's murder fired the bullets that killed him. I give Davis kudos for interviewing both sides, both the prosecutor and the defense team, both the widow and the alleged murderer. And I don't know whether I think the alleged murderer is the actual killer or not.

This is also a book about ethics, and about some of the ugliest questions ethics can bring you face to face with. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty; everyone has the right to an adequate defense. Even a man who raped two little girls and then threw them out a window. Even a man who raped his own daughter and beat her to death when she got pregnant. Even a man who tortured his seven year old stepson to death over the course of several months. And of course there's the looming question of the death penalty. Not all of the Murder Task Force are against the death penalty in general; as one of them says, it's wrong when it's MY CLIENT you're trying to kill. But, as with Defending Gary, written by Gary Ridgway's defense team, the defense lawyers' view of the death penalty--of the legal process in general--is starkly different from the ordinary view, and I think this Alice through the Looking-Glass perspective is a good one to have, a good reminder that (a) the American legal process is not infallible and (b) abstract ethics are all well and good, but applying them to non-abstract people is . . . tricky.

This is a good book, but not a great one, and I've been trying to figure out what it is that didn't quite satisfy me about it. It wasn't the ambiguity of the central case; that doesn't bother me and it's not something Davis could control anyway. But I feel as if he could have dug deeper, somehow, as if there's some dimension he left unexplored. This is certainly a great piece of journalism; his coverage of the Lee case is excellent. But as a book, it just didn't quite hang together for me.



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Review: Mitchell, The Class Project

The Class Project: How To Kill a Mother: The True Story of Canada's Infamous Bathtub Girls by Bob Mitchell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This book suffers from all the stereotypical flaws of self-published works: poor cover design, poor interior design, spelling errors and typos abounding...

It's the story of the murder of "Linda Andersen" by her daughters "Sandra" and "Beth" (since the girls were sentenced as juveniles, Canadian law prohibits their identities ever being made known), a carefully premeditated and executed murder, and the girls would have gotten away clean if the older sister had been able to keep her mouth shut. What makes the case particularly appalling is that several of the girls' friends knew what they were going to do ahead of time and offered advice and encouragement. One of them may have supplied the Tylenol-3's with which Sandra and Beth drugged their mother before drowning her in the bathtub. Nobody told the cops. Nobody told a parent. Nobody said, "Hey, wait a minute." And all the evidence is logged in MSN chats.

Mitchell writes like a reporter, so there isn't a lot of nuance or analysis, but the amount of direct quotation he does allows you to see how these girls talked, what they said and how they said it. What annoys me most about Mitchell is that there's a fundamental question at the root of the story: was Linda Andersen a hopeless alcoholic (as her daughters saw her) or was she a hard-working mother whose thankless daughters were never satisfied with what she did for them (as her friends and extended family saw her)? Were the Andersen family finances a wreck because Linda spent all the money on alcohol (daughters) or because her daughters demanded designer clothes (family)? And Mitchell, for all the things that he lays out as flat as asphalt, never explicitly says that Beth and Sandra were correct (although the fact that they spent the day of Linda's murder getting her drunk on vodka and lemonade is suggestive)--or never explains how the evidence shows that some of what Beth and Sandra said was correct (Linda drank too much) and some of what the family said was correct (Beth and Sandra felt entitled to a lifestyle their mother couldn't afford), which is the most realistic option. But "most realistic" isn't necessarily the same as true. Did Beth and Sandra have genuine reasons for feeling that no one would help them, since all the adults in their lives refused to admit their mother had a drinking problem--or was it in fact true that their mother didn't have a drinking problem? If I'm supposed to end this book uncertain about the answers to these questions, I would really have liked Mitchell to tell me that the evidence was ambiguous and I'm supposed to feel that way, instead of me being left feeling like Mitchell didn't do his job.



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Review: Leveritt, Devil's Knot

Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three by Mara Leveritt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[audiobook]
[library]

Thirteen discs is a very long time to hate somebody's voice.

The book is fascinating, and I'm glad I own it in print, but I cannot recommend the audiobook because that's how much I hated the reader's voice. That said, this is an excellent book about the West Memphis Three and I do recommend it highly. Leveritt is careful and thorough and she digs into questions in a way I really appreciate. I'm sure people who believe the guilty verdict think she's grossly biased; I think she's doing her best to be fair to people who don't deserve the courtesy

In 1993, three little boys were horribly murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas; with no evidence except hearsay, the police decided (1) the murders were "occult" and (2) they were committed by a kid named Damien Echols because he was "weird," a kid named Jason Baldiwn because he wore black t-shirts and listened to Metallica and was (gasp!) Damien's friend, and a kid named Jesse Miskelley because they browbeat him into confessing. Damien, Jason, and Jesse are about my age, and I think of all the kids I knew in high school who were "weird" or who wore black t-shirts and listened to heavy metal (and because I did not grow up in western Arkansas, I knew more than one of each), and I want to start screaming at people, starting with the juvenile probation officer who decided without evidence that Damien was a Satanist more than a year before the crimes and would not leave him the fuck alone, then the cops who conducted such a slipshod and panicky investigation, advancing to the prosecutors, and possibly not even ending with the judge. All three boys were tried as adults and found guilty of capital murder; Damien (the alleged ringleader) was sentenced to death. (After the book was written, a circuit court judge reviewed the trials and allowed the three, after a decade in prison, to enter Alford pleas and walk free. To this day the murders have not been solved.) The gross prostitution of justice documented in this book makes me furiously angry, and I think Leveritt's comparison with the Salem witchcraft crisis is not inapt, in that the people committing evil here are not the suspects, but their prosecutors and judges. It's hard for me to believe that anyone would commit such evil--the railroading of innocent teenagers--on purpose, but it's equally hard for me to believe that any rational human being could look at Jesse Miskelley's "confession" and not recognize that it is made of leading questions and desperation. And that's clearly something that perplexes Leveritt as well.

So yeah. Excellent book, shame about the audio version.



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Review: Zuckoff, Frozen in Time

Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II by Mitchell Zuckoff

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


[library]
[audiobook]

Zuckoff was doing his own reading, and I did not like him as a reader, which may have influenced my generally meh opinion of the book.

During World War II, a cargo plane was lost over Greenland. One of the B-17s sent out to search for it wrecked on a glacier, and its crew was trapped out there for four months. In the efforts to rescue them, a Grumman Duck disappeared with three men aboard. So Zuckoff is telling the saga of the B-17 crew's survival and rescue, and then also the modern day expedition (in which he participated) to find the Duck and repatriate the remains of the three lost men.

Zuckoff is a competent author, and his material was (potentially) fascinating, but I just didn't find myself fascinated. He alienated me by banging the We Must Bring Fallen Heroes Home! drum at every opportunity--which is not to say that I think we shouldn't, or that I don't think these guys were heroes, but there's a difference between acknowledging that and being sentimental about it, and Zuckoff is definitely (endlessly) sentimental. I deeply dislike and distrust sentimentality, so I was at odds with the author basically through the whole thing.



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Review: Gonzales, Everyday Survival

Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things by Laurence Gonzales

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The subtitle of the book is "Why Smart People Do Stupid Things," and the tl;dr answer is "because they're not paying attention." Gonzales is arguing that there are a lot of things in our lives that we* aren't paying enough attention to--he talks about what he calls a "vacation state of mind"--and discussing what happens when we don't pay attention, both in terms of what our brains do, the automatic scripts that run because (a) this situation is LIKE another situation, or (b) this script has always worked in this situation before (He doesn't mention the terrible fire in the London Underground, where a woman had people walk right by her into the boiling greasy smoke as she was trying desperately to get them to stop. Because that script had always worked before.) and in terms of what happens when an automatic script runs that isn't appropriate.

I was disappointed by this book because it is a bait and switch. Most of what Gonzales is talking about isn't why smart people do stupid things; he's really talking about why we are destroying our environment and how we can make ourselves stop, a question which requires him to go all the way back to the Big Bang to make his argument. Please note, I don't disagree with him about the importance of that question, but (1) that's really not what I was hoping for and (2) he is terribly didactic, and that's offputting whether I agree with him or not. I don't even want to be put off by it, since (not being stupid) I do think the topic is important and I thought his take was interesting and useful, but I spent half the book feeling like he was beating me over the head with a hammer.

And I really would have liked more on the original question, because what he had was fascinating.

---

*For the purposes of this book "we" are middle-class Americans. "We" are decidedly not anyone else.



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Review: Firstman & Talan, The Death of Innocents

The Death of Innocents: A True Story of Murder, Medicine, and High-Stake Science by Richard Firstman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I don't know where to start.

Okay, this is an excellent book about a very complicated subject. Part of it is about Waneta Hoyt, a serial murderer whose targets were her own infants; part of it is about SIDS and apnea and the incredibly influential theory linking the two that was launched by a study including Hoyt's fourth and fifth babies--and the moral and ethical tangle caused by the fact that SIDS and infanticide (and/or Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy) look exactly the same. Firstman & Talan do an amazing job of laying all of this (including the evidence that discredits the apnea theory of SIDS) out clearly, in compelling language, and making it as easy to follow as is humanly possible.

It is a massive brick of a book (mine has gained character by being dropped in the bathtub), but I read it with absorbed attention from first to last.

The terrible thing is that Molly and Noah Hoyt could have been saved. The nurses at the medical center where they were being studied were convinced that their mother was causing their apneic spells, but the doctor in charge--the man with the theory--ignored them. Firstman & Talan find evidence of that happening in other hospitals, too: the person who could intervene to save a child's life is too blinded by their own theory to see the evidence in front of them. This is definitely a cautionary tale about the danger of having a theory (and, as Sherlock Holmes says, twisting the facts to suit it): people become so enamored of the theory, they stop actually analyzing the evidence, and they do massive harm to the babies they're supposed to be helping.

In comparison, Waneta Hoyt's evil is painfully straight-forward. She wanted her babies to stop crying, so they did.



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Review: Johnson, What Lisa Knew

What Lisa Knew by Joyce Johnson




One of the many sad things about Lisa Steinberg is that I'd never heard of her before. Her murder is yet another cause celebre that vanished overnight--all those Crimes of the Century that turn out not to be--the major difference in Lisa's case being that she was only six years old when she died in 1987, the victim of a combination of child abuse and child neglect. It's questionable, I suppose, whether her alleged parents (black-market adoption, and they never bothered to get the paperwork done to make it legal) meant for her to die, but one of them beat her to death and they both failed to call an ambulance for possibly as much as 12 hours.

Johnson's major point--aside from the general outrage at the way Lisa was treated and the way that all the adults around her seem to have been struck blind when it came to noticing egregious signs of neglect and abuse--is the way in which Hedda Nussbaum (Lisa's "mother") and her attorneys deployed a set of narratives and cultural beliefs, about mothers, about battered women, to simply shut down any line of questioning that wondered about Nussbaum's complicity--or agency--in Lisa's death. They put it all on Joel Steinberg; Nussbaum testified against him, and that, too, provided a very simple narrative schema, where her role as witness/victim of Steinberg's abuse (and I don't want to deny that Steinberg abused her; they may have had a BDSM relationship, but it was neither safe, nor sane, and while it started out consensual, I'm not sure it stayed that way) precluded her being an abuser herself. Johnson does not believe this narrative and goes to considerable, careful lengths to re-open those thorny questions. Her abhorrence of both Nussbaum and Steinberg comes through very clearly.

This is a very good, very sad book.



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Review: Reel, Perrusquia & Sullivan, The Blood of Innocents

Blood of Innocents: The True Story of Multiple Murder in West Memphis, Arkansas by Guy Reel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Like Devil's Knot, this is a book about the West Memphis murders. It was written before Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley were offered an Alford plea, and it is much less certain about their innocence. I would call it agnostic, really. Reel, Perrusquia, and Sullivan don't have a theory; they are just telling the story of the case. (Which is itself a loaded undertaking, but I don't think they have an axe to grind.) Although Leveritt includes a lot of information in Devil's Knot that Reel, Perrusquia, and Sullivan don't have, they present some details she leaves out, including unfortunate details that point towards Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley's possible guilt. There are things she paints as ridiculous about the police investigation that they provide real explanations of--explanations that have to have been available to Leveritt as well.

But there's a lot they agree on. Reel, Perrusquia, and Sullivan do emphasize that the police investigation was a mess and that the prosecutors didn't present evidence beyond a reasonable doubt in court. They may not be sure about guilt or innocence, but they make it clear that Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley did not get fair trials. I got less angry reading this book than I did Leveritt--who is trumpeting MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE on almost every page about the trials--but the calmer assessment comes down to the same thing.

This was a better book than I was expecting (based on its paperback original publication and its lurid and badly designed cover, which I know isn't fair). Four stars.



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Review: Masters, Killing for Company

Killing for Company: The Story of a Man Addicted to Murder by Brian Masters




I don't think the comparisons with In Cold Blood are justified (mostly because In Cold Blood is so much its own thing that it's hard to compare anything to it usefully), but this is a very good book about how and why one particular serial killer became what he was (he died last year).

Nilsen would be tragic if he hadn't killed fifteen young men: intelligent, ambitious, driven by his staunch union beliefs, living alone except for his faithful mongrel bitch Bleep, unable to form connections with other (living) people. But then there are the murders and his macabre near worship of the corpses ... and the utterly grotesquely utilitarian methods by which he disposed of the bodies.

Masters is a very calm dispassionate narrator, always looking past what Nilsen--who was extremely articulate--said about what he did to the reasons underneath. He does an excellent job of showing where the crevasse in Nilsen's psyche was, even if he can't quite explain it any more than Nilsen or any of the defense or prosecution psychiatrists can.



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Review: Millard, River of Doubt

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


[library]
[audiobook]

I don't know about this one. I listened to it with great attention (the reader is excellent), and I enjoyed it, but when it was over, I was left feeling sort of meh? about it. Millard has certainly done her research, and she has a good prose style. I can't tell if it's that she killed her own efforts at suspense (quoting from Roosevelt's post-expedition accounts makes it quite clear that he survived, no matter how dramatically you describe his near-death state) or if it's just that there isn't very much story here: Roosevelt and a Brazilian explorer descend a hitherto uncharted river in the hostile heart of the Amazon. All but three of their company make it out alive--one drowning, one murder, and the murderer who fled into the jungle and was presumably killed by something or someone in very quick order. There's a lot of individual events that are quite exciting, in various ways, but there's no real throughline, and I can't quite put my finger on why. (I found the bits set in New York much more vivid and compelling than the bits set in Brazil, and I'm not sure why that is, either, except possibly that where Millard really excels is in writing the history of complicated and sophisticated human interactions, and the thing that this expedition stripped right out of everybody was complexity and sophistication.)

In any event, if you're interested in Theodore Roosevelt or the history of the exploration of the Amazon, this is well worth checking out, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it more generally.

Three stars? Four stars? I'm going to give it four, but that's for the way she writes the set-up and denouement, not the expedition that is the point of the book.



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Review: Karr-Morse & Wiley, Ghosts from the Nursery

Ghosts From The Nursery: Tracing The Roots Of Violence by Robin Karr-Morse

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I wanted this book to be more interesting than it was. Maybe it's just that it's 20 years old, or that its conclusions seem so common-sense to me: yes, of course, the first three years of a person's life are vital to their development, and if those years are filled with abuse and neglect, the person is likely--though not guaranteed--to turn out violent, impulsive, and thus most likely to commit violent crimes. Intervention can turn a child's life around, but the earlier the better, and sometimes no amount of intervention can undo the damage done. Their prose was competent but unexciting, and I never felt really engaged by the book.



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