Review: Yallop, Deliver Us from Evil

Deliver Us From Evil by David A. Yallop

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book about the Yorkshire Ripper is at its best at the end, where Yallop actually talks about his own research experiences and opinions and theories. Yallop went on to write a number of conspiracy theory books about the Vatican, so I'm a little leery of some of his claims, but comparison with the Wikipedia article says that he's as accurate as he can be in 1982 (the identity of "Wearside Jack," the hoaxer who sent a tape recording to the police claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper and caused the wildest and most costly of wild goose chases, wasn't discovered (via DNA) until 2006), and certainly he lays out the logical steps by which he arrived at, not the identity of Peter Sutcliffe, but a pretty narrow range of men to consider. And I appreciate the anger with which he asks why the police couldn't do the same. I also appreciate his understanding (a) that Sutcliffe's motivation was hatred of women, not a moral crusade against prostitution (that being the red herring Sutcliffe laid across his tracks at trial) and (b) how Sutcliffe was a product of systemic misogyny, that he was a symptom of a much bigger problem. Yallop can see the connections between how women were (and still are) being treated globally and how one man could decide that he had a perfect right to kill as many of us as he could. It's a remarkably feminist perspective to find from a male writer in 1982, and it made me like Yallop in a way that the body of the book did not.

Most of this book is the chintzy kind of true crime that is written alternating between the POV of the murderer and the POV of his victims (including a slow build to the murder of Barbara Leach, the 11th of 13 murdered women, with extracts from her letters--I recognize that he's trying to do a ring composition, tracing both Leach and Sutcliffe from the beginning of Sutcliffe's murderous career, but clearly he got permission to use the letters of the 11th victim rather than the 13th, so his ring composition is broken before he even starts to make it; I feel callous for pointing this out, but it bothered me, and I can't help feeling that Yallop should have known better), with occasional excursions into the POV of the police. It's not badly done, as these things go, although Yallop can be confusing. He never names the murderer, and he describes at least one murder that Peter Sutcliffe didn't commit but that was attributed to him. (This is on purpose because Yallop thinks the man who murdered Joan Harrison was Wearside Jack, a theory disproved by DNA in 2011.) So it got kind of hard to keep track of who was doing what. And in any event, I can never get away from the feeling that writing from the POV of the victims is cheating, and none of the body of the book gave me the intellectual thrill of Yallop's description of his own research.

Four stars on the basis of the last 50 or so pages. Otherwise three.



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Review: Trow, Interpreting the Ripper Letters

Interpreting the Ripper Letters: Missed Clues and Reflections on Victorian Society by M.J. Trow

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the kind of book I've come to expect from M. J. Trow: interesting, easy to read, refreshingly commonsensical (a rare trait in a book about Jack the Ripper), slapdash in the research. He also loses points for being the kind of guy who thinks women accuse men of sexual harassment for fun, and in general he's pretty you-kids-get-off-my-lawn about the 21st century, but he makes a surprisingly cogent point at the end, that the people who wrote Jack the Ripper letters were basically the same thing as internet trolls.

Trow does not for a moment believe that the Jack the Ripper letters were written by the Whitechapel murderer (I forgive him SO MANY THINGS for his take on Patricia Cornwell), so his analysis of them is really an analysis of the darker corners of the public reaction to the murders. Since I've read Evans and Skinner's excellent Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell, there weren't any big surprises for me: the people who claim to be Jack the Ripper, the people who claim to know who Jack the Ripper is, the people who are so chaotic and dysfunctional it's hard to tell WHAT they're claiming, if anything. Trow also traces the lines of misinformation that start the instant the police decide the Dear Boss letter is genuine and goes into some of the wackier "solutions," like Stephen Knight's infamous conspiracy theory involving Sir William Gull, Walter Sickert, and the Freemasons, and an idea apparently floating around the internet right now that Lewis Carroll was the murderer. And he talks about other serial killers who did write to the newspapers and the police, like Neill Cream and the Zodiac, although he doesn't really come up with any clear-cut explanation of what he's trying to prove.

I don't know how you ought to organize a book about the Ripper letters, but Trow did not pick the best way, since I'm hard-pressed to identify what his organizational principle was. Insofar as a book 179 pages long can feel meandering, this one did. But it was a very down-to-earth and rational discussion of an extremely irrational crop of letters.

Three and a half stars, round up to four.



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Review: Moss & Skinner, Scotland Yard's History of Crime in 100 Objects

Scotland Yard's History of Crime in 100 Objects by Alan Moss

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A partial tour of Scotland Yard's Black Museum in book form, this book has excellent pictures, a poorly chosen font (sans serif gray on white), and interesting although not terribly well-written text. Despite what the title might lead you to believe, it is not in chronological order, which I think was a mistake, since it means that there's no actual sense of coherent history, just a series of interesting objects with explanations. Still, as the closest I am ever likely to get to a tour of the Black Museum, it was worth the read.



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Review: Schutze, Bully

Bully: A True Story of High School Revenge by Jim Schutze

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a better book than I thought it was going to be. It starts off slowly, partly because Schutze is trying to convey the aimlessness of the lives of his protagonists, white middle-class high school drop outs who work minimum wage jobs (if at all) and smoke a powerful amount of marijuana along with doing a variety of other drugs. Ironically, the only one who was even trying for anything better was the murder victim, Bobby Kent, and it's not clear how much of that was HIS motivation and how much was his father's pushing. These are kids whose parents don't know what to do with them and who don't know what to do with themselves. They have no aspirations, no work ethic, and the kind of amorality that tags along with entitlement. They feel they have the right to do whatever they want, and if that includes murder, well, then, so it does.

It's also clear that the murder victim is just as bad as any of the others. He's a bully, a homophobe, a rapist. He seems to enjoy his 'roid rage and go out of his way to find people to vent it on. He and his best friend/murderer had a habit of harassing mentally disabled people. And, yes, that best friend/murderer oxymoron: Marty Puccio was Bobby Kent's best friend, but he was also his favorite punching bag, and eventually in the love/hate balance, hate got a lot heavier than love.

But this isn't just the story of Marty and Bobby. It's Marty's girlfriend Lisa who decides Bobby has to die and does all the planning, roping in a ridiculous number of people: her cousin, her friend, her friend's friend, her friend's boyfriend, a self-styled "Mafia hit man." Lisa can't commit murder herself---she tries and fails---but that doesn't lessen one iota her determination to see Bobby Kent dead.

The first half of the book, the lead-up to the murder, would almost be funny if you didn't know someone was going to end up dead, because these people are as incompetent at murder as they are at everything else. The second half of the book, the aftermath of the murder, would be funny if it weren't so appalling. They all agree they won't tell anyone, and within two days, five of them have told at least one person. They work out an alibi, but Marty can't remember what it is when he's talking to the cops. Lisa---and her mother and uncle and cousins---believes she hasn't actually done anything wrong. SHE didn't murder Bobby Kent; she literally didn't touch him. And she cannot grasp that that literal sense of murder simply isn't what's on the table. (She and several of the others are also violently allergic to the word "murder," like it's somehow better if you just say you killed someone.) She cannot grasp that what she did was just as wrong as what Marty did. She doesn't seem to have a real good grip on the idea that what she did was wrong at all. And Marty, who is a kind of ambivalent figure in the first half of the book---he goes along with all of Bobby's sadistic schemes, but he's also victimized by him, and Lisa insists that he has a softer side, that it's Bobby who makes him mean---doesn't seem to care. His feeling seems to be that if what he did was wrong, that's really not his problem. The book ends, almost triumphantly, with Marty getting the death penalty (and seems to be unaware of how this complicates the question emblazoned on the dust jacket, DOES ANYONE DESERVE TO DIE?), and I must note anticlimactically that his sentence was later commuted to life.

This is one of those cases that make pundits wail about modern youth. As a reference point, Bobby Kent was murdered in 1993.

Four stars.



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Review: Philbrick, The Last Stand

The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent book about the Battle of Little Bighorn. Philbrick has done extensive, careful research on both sides: Custer and the 7th Cavalry on the one hand, Sitting Bull and the Lakota and Cheyenne on the other. (Despite Stephen Ambrose's pairing of Crazy Horse and Custer, current historiography recognizes Sitting Bull as the leader of this piece of the resistance to white American imperialism.) He really digs into his sources, which I appreciate, and he assesses them carefully, although I think he's a little too willing to believe what Benteen says about Custer, and this credulity even though he talks about the obsessive, irrational quality of Benteen's hatred.

Philbrick is very readable, and he weaves together his widely disparate sources with respectful attention.



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Review: Vronsky, Serial Killers (2004)

Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book gets better as it goes along. The first chapter or so, on historical serial killers, is sketchy and does not distinguish clearly between things "everybody knows" about famous historical serial killers vs. things that have a basis in actual history. However, Vronsky improves mightily when talking about modern serial killers. He's very good at case studies and can range widely from the well-known to the obscure. He spends a chapter on behavioral profiling and criticism thereof and provides what seems to me an even handed assessment. And his last chapter is practical advice on avoiding becoming a victim.



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Review: Scott, Uncovering History (2013)

Uncovering History: Archaeological Investigations at the Little Bighorn by Douglas D. Scott

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is an overview of all the archaeological projects, both amateur and professional, at the Little Bighorn battlefields, going all the way back, as best as can be done, to 1876. Scott writes very clearly, and, as is obvious from the record of my reviews, I find the archaeology of the Little Bighorn fascinating. I particularly like the uses to which they are putting the discoveries of criminological ballistics. Not only can they trace the movement of individual weapons on the battlefield, they have been able to confirm the identities of several extant weapons (which is about the most iron-clad provenance you could ask for). They are also using, when they can, other techniques pioneered by law enforcement in their attempts to identify the skeletal remains that still are found from time to time. The remarkable thing is that they have been successful more than once.

If you're interested in the archaeology of the Little Bighorn, this is a good place to start.



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Review: McThenia & Cutright, A Case for Solomon (2012)

A Case for Solomon: Bobby Dunbar and the Kidnapping That Haunted a Nation by Tal McThenia

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent book about the Bobby Dunbar kidnapping case. (One of the co-writers is Bobby Dunbar's granddaughter.) It's beautifully and carefully written, exhaustive in its research, and as empathetic as possible with all sides.

(Short version: Bobby Dunbar, age 4, disappeared in 1912. In 1913, his (middle to upper-middle class) parents claimed a child found with an itinerant tinker as Bobby, even though the child had a well-attested (rural poor) identity as Bruce Anderson. W. C. Walters, the tinker, was tried for kidnapping and found guilty, though later released on a technicality. The protests of Bruce's mother were swept under the rug. The child was brought up as Bobby Dunbar. In 2004, one of his sons and one of his brother's sons agreed to a paternity test, which proved that in fact "Bobby Dunbar" was not Bobby Dunbar. Proving he was actually Bruce Anderson would require exhuming his body for a mitochondrial DNA test, and neither the Dunbars nor the Andersons feel this to be either necessary or desirable.)

McThenia and Cutright trace the story from Bobby Dunbar's disappearance, and they go very carefully into the reasons Lessie and Percy Dunbar came to believe, whole-heartedly and vehemently, that this was their child, and the reasons that they carried a lot of people with them. It's hard to tell from this distance and with mostly newspaper reports to go on (and McThenia and Cutright do a GREAT job with the newspapers, recognizing that the reporters were players in the story rather than objective recorders of it), what Bobby/Bruce understood about what was going on and why he did---or didn't---do certain things, such as his failure/refusal to recognize his real mother (he'd been traveling with Walters long enough that it's possible he really didn't remember her, although no one in 1913 seems to have entertained that idea), his passing all the "tests" of his identity that were reported in the papers, his general willingness to BE Bobby Dunbar. (Also, Bobby and Bruce seem to have had remarkably similar dispositions, so it wasn't as if he had to do any acting.) McThenia and Cutright offer some very mild speculations, but the inner world of a 4 to 5 year old child in 1913 is really just not available to us.

The book provokes a lot of unanswerable questions about the malleability of memory and identity, and the most unanswerable and bleakest of them all is, what happened to the real Bobby Dunbar? This is something McThenia and Cutright don't go into at all, and I wish they would have---not that there's very much there except the trail of his footprints that ended abruptly at the railroad tracks. To me, it looks like Bobby Dunbar really was kidnapped, but what happened to him after that is as much a mystery as what happened to Charley Ross. So it wouldn't have been more than a paragraph, but I would have liked just that acknowledgment that if "Bobby Dunbar" was really Bruce Anderson, there's still a child missing, a child whom the world stopped looking for in 1913.



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Review: Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil (2012)

The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty by Simon Baron-Cohen

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This is an okay book about how empathy works in the brain. Baron-Cohen is arguing that we should replace the idea of "evil"---which explains nothing about human nature---with the idea of zero empathy. People with borderline, antisocial, and narcissistic personality disorders have what he calls zero-negative empathy, which includes intentional cruelty and has no redeeming characteristics, while people on the autism spectrum have what he calls zero-positive empathy: they don't understand other people's emotions, but have no intent to harm, and their lack of empathy is (often) paired with increased pattern-recognition ability. I'm dubious about this descriptive schema, mostly because I feel like the gap between the autism spectrum and personality disorders is wider than he's trying to make it out to be (I also think he gets a little starry-eyed at the end, when he's talking about teaching empathy to psychopaths), but I think he's right that "zero empathy" is a more useful explanatory tool than "evil."

Three stars.

ETA 2020/03/01 The more I think about it, the less I like Baron-Cohen's ideas. Downgraded to two stars.



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Review: Sher, "Until You Are Dead" (2002)

"Until You Are Dead": Steven Truscott's Long Ride into History by Julian Sher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Despite its clunky title, this is a very good book about the Canadian Steven Truscott, who in 1959, at the age of 15, was sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper---a crime he did not commit. (His sentence was commuted to life in prison.) The book is partly a biography of Truscott and partly an investigation of the investigation into Lynne Harper's murder, pulling all the evidence out and examining it carefully, including evaluation of witnesses. The prosecution built its case on two child witnesses who couldn't keep their own stories straight but whose evidence pointed to Truscott's guilt, while seeking to discredit child witnesses who told consistent stories that exonerated Truscott. Also, because the laws of discovery in 1959 didn't require them to, the prosecution did not turn over to the defense a BOATLOAD of evidence that pointed toward Truscott's innocence, choosing instead to harp on the cherry-picked evidence that did not contradict the theory of Truscott's guilt. The trial judge was also biased toward the prosecution, and his charge to the jury was both biased and factually inaccurate. And then, of course, the authorities doubled-down as the legal question became a political question, not was Steven Truscott innocent? but were the police wrong? Judging by this book, it's almost impossible for someone living in 2020 to imagine how infallible the police and the legal system were perceived to be in 1959 and how vitally necessary the government felt that perception to be. (Many people in power seemed to feel that admitting error in the case of Steven Truscott would be tantamount to approving the downfall of Canadian civilization.) The history of Steven Truscott's attempts to prove his innocence is also a cultural history of the paradigm shift that is the 1960s, as mainstream culture learned to distrust its authority figures.

The book was published before a decision was reached in Truscott's final appeal, but Wikipedia tells me his conviction was overturned in 2007---even though, even then he wasn't declared innocent. It was merely admitted, finally, almost 50 years later, that his guilt was not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.



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Review: Ostwald, Vaslav Nijinsky (1991)

Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap Into Madness by Peter Ostwald

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


[my copy is signed "To Patricia" from Nijinsky's daughter Tamara]

This is an excellent biography of a very difficult subject, the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who "went mad" at the age of 30 and spent the second half of his life essentially mute. Even before that, Nijinsky was notoriously bad at communicating except through dance, so most of what Ostwald has to work with is what other people said about him. This is particularly problematic in the case of Nijinsky's wife Romola, who set herself up as the authority on all things Nijinsky and wrote two books about him, but who was demonstrably untruthful. Ostwald does a marvelous job of combing through Nijinsky's incomplete medical records and other sources both to assess Romola's narrative and to piece together an alternative story.

Not that there's a great deal of story to be had. Nijinsky's inner life remains inaccessible. Once he ceased to dance, it seems likely that that inner life was cruelly impoverished. This is a very sad biography, the story of someone whose enormous talent went largely wasted, in no small part, as Ostwald points out, because of his inability to work with others. His dreadful communication skills and his perfectionism combined to make him a nightmare for other dancers trying to work with him on his own (radically innovative) choreography, while his "temperament"---his depressive apathies and manic temper tantrums, both signs of his underlying psychological problems---made him equally a nightmare for those trying to get him to work, to perform regularly and to schedule, necessary for anyone wanting a career as a dancer. There's no doubt that Nijinsky was a genius, equally no doubt that that genius was something Nijinsky's flawed and tragically fragile psyche could not maintain without the help of the people (like his sister Bronislava) whom he drove away.



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Review: Stiles, Jesse James (2002)

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War by T.J. Stiles

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is both a biography of Jesse James and a social history of Missouri from about the 1850s to 1882, the year of James' death. As Stiles argues, the two are inextricably intertwined. Stiles makes no attempt to make Jesse James a sympathetic character, but he assesses him carefully and comes to the conclusion that, aside from being a ruthless, unrepentant killer, he was both politics-savvy and attention-hungry, combining his crimes with the rhetoric of the "Lost Cause" to make himself shockingly important in the politics of post Civil War Missouri. As always, my favorite chapter was the meta-analysis, where Stiles talks about the various narratives that have been laid over the figure of Jesse James, holding them up to James' biographical reality and discovering that none of them really fits.

This is a dense and cogently argued book that shines a pitiless light on the failure of Reconstruction as the backdrop to Jesse James' career.



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Review: Casey, Deliver Us (2015)

Deliver Us: Three Decades of Murder and Redemption in the Infamous I-45/Texas Killing Fields by Kathryn Casey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a book about some of the cases in the three decades and counting worth of murders (some solved, some unsolved, and some stuck in the limbo of we know who it is but we can't prove it) along I-45 between Houston and Galveston. Overall, Casey is a competent writer, although she has a tendency to oversell things that need to be undersold, and she has doggedly interviewed everyone who would sit still long enough, including the families of the victims, the investigating officers, and the prime suspects.

The book is necessarily somewhat inconclusive, since so many of the cases are unsolved (two victims were identified in 2019, and one of the main we know who it is but we can't prove it suspects led the police to two of his victims' bodies IN 2015), but Casey has done her best to find a narrative of each case (one victim's father founded Texas EquuSearch; another victim's parents have also gotten involved in helping the search for missing persons; one case got solved because an evidence officer fourteen years later had the wit to resubmit samples for DNA testing)---which would be why her subtitle includes the word "redemption." She doesn't mean for the killers (her interviews with them make it clear that redemption for them is a long way off, if possible at all; a couple are clearly psychopaths, for whom the word "redemption" is meaningless). She means for the families who have brute-forced good out of evil and for the investigators who haven't given up.



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Review: Roach, The Salem Witch Trials (2002)

The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-By-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege by Marilynne K. Roach

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a monumental work, both in that it is more than 600 pages long, counting appendices and in that, as the author says, it took her twenty-plus years. It's a day by day recounting of the Salem Village witchcraft crisis, correlated with things happening in surrounding villages, in Salem Town, in Boston (especially in the households of Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewell, since those gentlemen obligingly left records), on the Maine frontier, in England. She starts with an overview of Salem Village history from 1661 to 1691, then begins her exhaustive timeline in January 1692 and ends it with Samuel Sewell's apology in 1697, though she continues, in her epilogue, to note the aftereffects of the trials all the way to 2001, when the last of the accused were finally legally cleared of the charge of witchcraft. Her appendices list the accused, the afflicted, the accusers, those who signed petitions, and the membership of the Salem Village church. I longed for genealogical charts, but they would have required a supplementary volume to themselves, and she does note when two people are sisters or in-laws or otherwise related, revealing a web of interconnections and inter-relations that has not been apparent in any other book on Salem that I have read, even Boyer and Nussbaum's Salem Possessed, which is all about how the tensions between two Salem families were instrumental in causing the crisis. (She also, by noting the deaths of the Mather and Sewell children---and Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewell's reactions---makes very immediate and personal the horrible infant mortality rate in colonial New England, and really puts paid to the stereotype that the Puritans did not love their children.)

She does not speculate as to causes and motivations, merely notes the evidence as presented in the testimony of witnesses, both those who testified to the reality of the afflicted persons' sufferings and those who caught them in instances of fraud. She sorts out very patiently who said what and when they said it, and clarifies, for instance, that Cotton Mather never attended any of the witchcraft trials (only one hanging) and thus wrote his apologia on the simple assumption, not that spectral evidence was valid, but that if the judges---being intelligent and learned men---convicted a person, they must have done so for good reasons.

This is well-written, thoughtful, careful, extremely readable, even though it sounds like it wouldn't be. Highly recommended.



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Review: Freeman, The Field of Blood (2018)

The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent and extremely readable history of violence in Congress in the decades leading up to the Civil War. The infamous caning of Charles Sumner was not an isolated incident, and Freeman does a fantastic job of showing how violence and the threat of violence were used as tools by Southern congressmen to bully Northern congressmen into silence (just as they were using the threat of secession for a long time before anyone actually seceded). Freeman explores the ideology of Southern violence (the "code of honor") and presents the logic by which Southern congressmen considered themselves the victims of "degradation" and sectional violence. And she shows Northern congressmen's fear and frustration (and the marvelous non-violent tactics of John Quincy Adams) and how that fear slowly turned into responsive violence. Northerners started physically fighting back, and she argues that Congress acted as a microcosm and a barometer, both a cause and an effect of the growing tension and mutual mistrust between North and South. Violence in Congress didn't CAUSE the Civil War, but it was part of the vicious, escalating circle that kept North and South at each other's throats.

This is also, as sort of a subplot, a biography of Benjamin Brown French (whose claim to fame today is probably that he was the uncle of Daniel Chester French, who sculpted the Lincoln Memorial). French was a lot of things, but one of them was a voluminous diarist and another was someone who, through his various jobs and political activity, had a front row seat to the goings-on in antebellum Washington D.C. She uses him as a primary source, but she also traces his political development from what was called a "doughface" (a Northern Democrat who sought to appease the South) to a fervent Republican and supporter of Lincoln, due in no small part to the way he witnessed Southern and Northern congressmen behaving from the late 1830s through to the outbreak of war. French is a method for her to maintain continuity of narrative even as her cast of Congressional characters come and go, and although I'm reluctant to play the Everyman card, French is a profoundly ordinary man, vain and a little gullible and not very good at self-reflection (though extraordinarily energetic), and his journey offers an intimate look at how what happened in Congress affected the people of the United States.



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