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Ghettoside

3/5. Recounting of the murder of a young black man in L.A., the investigation, the arrest, the trial, with many diversions for all the lives touched and changed.

Good as the story of a crime and its impact on a family and community. Less good as an argument: she wants this book to stand for the proposition that black on black gang-related crime is desperately under-policed, while police attention is placed ruinously and oppressively on other things. Which, okay, you can make that argument, but using the murder of the son of a homicide police officer and the extraordinary efforts made to solve it is a pretty odd choice. Also, I'm sure this book did itself no favors by being published in the years when the abolish the police movement was gathering itself together; this book has no truck with that, to put it mildly. Which, again, okay, make your arguments, but for real, if one of your arguments is to literally say it's a good thing for the state to have a monopoly on violence . . . well. That's not just out-of-step, that's a whole different drummer. And the shape of this book can't really back that up since it's busy with this very particular crime.

It is good at what it's doing – portraits of young black men and the people who love them as they kill each other, and more broadly an invocation of the weight of loss and grief that crushes a community in the grips of high homicide rates. It's awful. This book is good at invoking that. But turning that into any sort of argument or prescription? No.

Also, I find it inherently untrustworthy that she erases herself from this narrative, though she was present for many of the events or interviewed those who were. The only references she makes to herself are a few coy "this author" type phrases at the very end. This particular technique always drives me nuts. You can't ride along for a police investigation and then tell the story as if you were never there, as if your presence didn't change things, as if you never spoke or made a face or, say, changed the gender balance in a room (which she totally would have, there are no lady cops here). I get this is a reportorial style but yeah no, I do not like it and I do not trust it.

The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Feh. In the afterward, the author thanks a whole bunch of people for helping her with the technical aspects of the chemistry. And I was like "ahaha what technical aspects? What chemistry?" This book is like the Youtube video of chemistry: the "technical" sections would read something like, "he ground the tissue into a paste, then boiled it in a simple solution. And then he added nitric acid and the whole thing flared green!"

That isn't chemistry, that's a Mr. Rogers voice over. And this is not science writing. It's history with a sprinkle of description using science words on top, with no exploration of how or why.

The book could have been somewhat redeemed with interesting historical content, given that's what it was really doing. And there is a lot of stuff here about the founding of the first true American forensics lab, and the institution of a lot of modern law enforcement procedures against a corrupt political background. Oh, and a whole bunch of stuff about the homebrewed poisons of the prohibition era, when a glass of moonshine actually could kill you. But it was disorganized and shallow, with the usual journalist focus on the sensationalist details of cases without any real analysis or depth.

And the fake "science writing" was astonishingly irritating.

Didn't I just swear off nonfiction by reporters? Well, I'm doing it again, and this time I'll actually check first so it sticks.




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Deadly Innocence by Scott Burnside

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
So I keep reading true crime when what I actually want to be reading are the custodial offender interview reports from the Behavioral Sciences Unit. Those are slightly harder to get your hands on (not impossible, though). And one of these days I'm just going to have to stop reading true crime as a pale, pale substitute, because, well, insert a brief essay here on the many reasons true crime is inherently problematic.



This particular book is actually half-decent. Paul Bernardo raped an uncertain number of women in Canada and then, with the coerced help of his wife, kidnapped, tortured, and killed school girls. Bernardo is about as typical an anger-excitation rapist sadist as you can find, complete with huge mommy issues and textbook financial scamming. The authors of this book are right to say that his wife, Karla, is the much more interesting of the two. Somehow, the long, grueling descriptions of her subjugation are more brutal to read than the brief, jigsaw reconstructions of the murders.



Anyway, not bad as true crime goes, with a nearly alarming adherence to flat reportage and relatively mild doses of the misogyny and classism that can get pretty toxic in true crime. Still, not at all what I wanted – this book is all what and why and when and how, and the only thing that I ever really want to know is why.




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Books two through four of the Temperance Brennan series (I couldn't find the first book at my usual source, and though I’m generally fastidious about these things, it didn’t seem to matter this time). Said Temperance Brennan is a forensic anthropologist who divides her time between teaching in North Carolina and solving crimes via examination of skeletal remains in Quebec. Death Du Jour is about identifying the remains after a devastating house fire, Deadly Decisions has something or other to do with bikers, and Fatal Voyage features the discovery of unaccounted remains at the site of a fatal plane crash.

Meh. I am once again taken in by the mistaken belief that surely books this popular and well discussed must have something to them, right? People do have a modicum of taste and literary judgment, yes?

Apparently, people have a taste for plots which are entirely held together by a soupy glue of wild coincidence and random chance. A lot of criminal activities and organizations have specific ties to both Charlotte and Quebec, you know. Oh, and it is very common for the various family members and loved ones of an investigator to randomly go wandering into the line of fire in a case. Happens to me all the time. People also apparently like cardboard angst and a wooden romance – the entire scene preceding the first hook-up of our main couple is summarized in a paragraph, with such deathless prose as, “and Ryan disclosed his feelings about [fill in random life event of note].” Oi.

In comparison to the painfully abbreviated attempts at character and the flailings of the plot, Reichs devotes swaths of the text to explanations of things like spatter pattern analysis in physical assaults. Which I personally find fascinating, but all things told I’d take a textbook over this any day. Far less irritating.

Some of my wrath is disappointment – I’m fond of Bones, the spin-off TV show. It also features Temperance Brennan, forensic anthropologist, but her location, friends, coworkers, and story are entirely different. The dialogue is snappy, the secondary characters charming, the potential relationship actually touching, oh and David Boreanaz is a goofy but talented FBI agent. Good times all around.

This book distinguishes itself from the mass of Ripper scholarship by offering up a great deal more social and political context in an effort to explain why the Ripper story has endured and flowered in cultural consciousness. At least that’s what it says, and it’s mostly true -- between the chapters on each of the canonical Ripper victims there’s a wealth of material on police procedure and internal politics, the rise of the Victorian social conscience, and the explosive growth of the news media. It’s all thoroughly researched and logically presented, if a bit dully exhaustive at a few points, and there’s a refreshing lack of the ubiquitous Ripper conspiracies.

A good book, really, though I can’t help holding the oxymoronic title against it. Especially considering that from where I’m sitting, you simply cannot have a “definitive” discussion of a serial killer without ever even approaching the topic of psychology. Begg is only marginally more informed on criminal behavior than the police of 1888 were. He describes, for example, the controversy over the authenticity of the “dear boss” letters ostensibly written by the killer (who named himself Jack the Ripper in his signature) and sent to the papers. It’s a thorough discussion, but it completely overlooks the fact that the Ripper is a classic disorganized offender – impulsive, violent to the point of extreme overkill, opportunistic – and that his type is exactly the sort to write to the papers and otherwise inject himself into an investigation.

Anyway, griping aside, you can’t cover everything. The book does offer some fascinating discussions of issues vital to the time period, like the upper-class British response to the white slave trade in young girls and the slow groundswell of socialist feeling. The thesis is logical, and Begg does a pretty good job in describing the ripe hotbed of social unease in which the killings took place, though a bit less so regarding what it meant for the future of London's poor. And the recitation of the recoverable facts from the police investigations has a wonderfully charming familiarity, reminding me that the basic principles of investigation have and will remain the same over the centuries.

A good overview of the issues free from a lot of the Ripper hysterics and elaborate theories. It doesn’t entirely do what it set out to accomplish (Begg never accounts for the fact that Ripper-mania has really only flourished in the past fifty years, not endured straight through) and the writing is rather boring sometimes, but still worth it, if this is your thing.

One half of this book recounts the trials and triumphs accompanying the construction of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The personalities of its architects and builders come alive, as does the broader scope of the endeavor as an international symbol of America’s progress and an exhibition of some of the greatest achievements of engineering and industry ever seen. The other half of the book, woven through this narrative, details the life of Herman Webster Mudgett, alias Dr. H. H. Holmes, the psychopath who stalked the exhibition and one of the first American serial killers recorded.

Larson’s idea here, as expressed at beginning and end, was to juxtapose the vaulting human pride in great achievement with the depths of extreme depravity. His intent was to “say something profound about human nature,” which is great, but would have been a lot better if he’d, you know, said what that something was. The contrast of the two stories does have an effective narrative oomph, but the whole thing never quite gels. I don’t actually think this is entirely Larson’s fault, though. The sections on the fair are truly fantastic, top-notch work, written in that personal but informative way of really solidly researched history. The Holmes sections, for various reasons, rely much more heavily on speculation and extrapolation. It’s hard to dissect the activities of a killer active over a century ago, before modern law enforcement or forensic tools, to say nothing of the problems inherent to writing a killer’s biography. There are, after all, only two people present at the moments of greatest narrative tension; one of them will not survive, and the other is the original unreliable narrator. This leaves the writer with the delicate work of reconstructing events and writing them with the correct truthful distance, but the appropriate punch. Larson fumbles here on multiple counts, though I really can’t fault him for it -- he simultaneously speculates where he shouldn't, going so far as to narrate multiple murder scenes, and then he bows to the lack of information and says practically nothing about what Holmes actually did at the fair itself. (I suggest, incidentally, as an exemplar of how to navigate these problems very, very well, John Douglas’s Anyone You Want Me To Be).

Still, this is worth reading for the exhibition history alone. This was, after all, the event that brought the world the zipper, the first automated kitchen, Juicy Fruit gum, Shredded Wheat, and marvels of beauty and engineering never dreamed of, like the Farris Wheel. And it is also worth reading for Holmes, and for the great conceit the book envisions but never quite reaches.