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Kasserman, Fall River Outrage
Jan. 4th, 2015 10:03 amFall River Outrage: Life, Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England by David Richard Kasserman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
It's sad that there are enough of these books to constitute a sub-genre of historical criminology: man with status murders woman without status, is tried for it, and is acquitted, with more or less legal shenanigans accompanying. The absolute bar-none best of them is The Murder of Helen Jewett by Patricia Cohen, but I have a small collection, and really, about all I can say about Fall River Outrage is that it's a perfectly acceptable, middle-of-the-road member of the genre.
I picked it up mostly because I was amused/intrigued by a book about a murder in Fall River, MA, that wasn't about Lizzie Borden; after a kind of rocky start (Kasserman is not good at the--to be fair--quite difficult job of describing the complicated action of the discovery of a body, particularly with the jurisdictional nightmare that Sarah Maria Cornell's murder turned out to be), this is a very interesting slice of mid-nineteenth-century New England sociology and an okay report of the two trials and acquittal of Ephraim Kingsbury Avery for a murder it's pretty clear he committed. (Kasserman is/was an anthropologist who came to the Cornell murder by way of an interest in the New England cotton industry, so that ordering of priorities is not wrong.)
Like all of these books, therefore, it's in some ways a frustrating read. I've never read one of them where I actually had any reasonable doubt about the guilt of the murderer, so watching the son of a bitch get off is maddening. For this book, that's balanced by the panorama it provides of the Methodist Church in New England in 1832--and really, if I'm going to recommend Fall River Outrage, that's what I'm recommending it for.
View all my reviews
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
It's sad that there are enough of these books to constitute a sub-genre of historical criminology: man with status murders woman without status, is tried for it, and is acquitted, with more or less legal shenanigans accompanying. The absolute bar-none best of them is The Murder of Helen Jewett by Patricia Cohen, but I have a small collection, and really, about all I can say about Fall River Outrage is that it's a perfectly acceptable, middle-of-the-road member of the genre.
I picked it up mostly because I was amused/intrigued by a book about a murder in Fall River, MA, that wasn't about Lizzie Borden; after a kind of rocky start (Kasserman is not good at the--to be fair--quite difficult job of describing the complicated action of the discovery of a body, particularly with the jurisdictional nightmare that Sarah Maria Cornell's murder turned out to be), this is a very interesting slice of mid-nineteenth-century New England sociology and an okay report of the two trials and acquittal of Ephraim Kingsbury Avery for a murder it's pretty clear he committed. (Kasserman is/was an anthropologist who came to the Cornell murder by way of an interest in the New England cotton industry, so that ordering of priorities is not wrong.)
Like all of these books, therefore, it's in some ways a frustrating read. I've never read one of them where I actually had any reasonable doubt about the guilt of the murderer, so watching the son of a bitch get off is maddening. For this book, that's balanced by the panorama it provides of the Methodist Church in New England in 1832--and really, if I'm going to recommend Fall River Outrage, that's what I'm recommending it for.
View all my reviews
