UBC: Michaud & Hazelwood, The Evil That Men Do

[truepenny]

The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey into the Minds of Sexual Predators by Stephen G. Michaud

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So I'm figuring out that there's a problem with biographies that are about what a person does rather than who a person is, and that's that they become, by the nature of the beast, laudatory: self-congratulatory in autobiographical form ("I did this and this and this and this, and people were very impressed with that, and ...") and hagiographic in the biographical, like this one. From Michaud's account it more or less sounds like Hazelwood is 7 feet tall and breathes fire. And the thing is, Hazelwood was clearly a remarkable man (he died in 2016) who accomplished remarkable things. But it's hard to see that past the interference of Michaud's paean to St. Roy.

(Yes, I'm exaggerating. No, not by much. It's a problem I've seen repeatedly and have just with this one figured out why.)

So this is a highlights reel of Hazelwood's career as a profiler and equivocal death investigator. The case study parts are extremely interesting; Hazelwood was clearly very very good at the part of profiling that I think is most valuable: when you look at a crime scene, what does the scene tell you about the perpetrator? But the stuff around that was just kind of meh. I'm not really interested in what a wonderful person Hazelwood was (and he was, I'm not trying to say that I think Roy Hazelwood doesn't deserve praise); this would be why mostly I don't read biographies. I read books like The Evil That Men Do because I'm interested in puzzle solving. The hagiography is just distracting.



View all my reviews

Comments

[lydy]

Have you listened to the podcast "Into the Dark"? It's a detailed analysis of the response to the Jacob Wetterling disappearance. I found it fascinating. If the reporters are correct, the cops totally screwed the pooch. Also, Patti Wetterling comes across as far more nuanced than she was portrayed in the media.

[truepenny]

I have not. I will have to find that. Thank you!