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| B08XQXH432
| 4.29
| 113
| 2021
| Jun 24, 2021
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really liked it
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I received a free copy of this from the author for review. First there was Batman Begins and now we have Block Begins. Lawrence Block seems like a perma I received a free copy of this from the author for review. First there was Batman Begins and now we have Block Begins. Lawrence Block seems like a permanent fixture in crime fiction to me so it’s hard to imagine that there was ever a time when someone couldn’t wander into any bookstore or library and find several shelves filled with his works. However, everybody has to start somewhere, and in this memoir of the early days of his writing life Mr. Block tells us how he got his. It wasn’t exactly a straight line even if he knew what he wanted to do from the time he was fifteen years old and got encouragement from an English teacher. A job at a shady literary agency provided invaluable experience and contacts to start his career churning out material under various pen names, most of it erotica, but even after he had his start Mr. Block bounced around between college and sometimes worked other jobs even as he was paying the bills with his writing. This isn’t a traditional memoir. As Mr. Block explains, he began it in 1994 and wrote most of it one quick burst, but even though he had a publisher for it he set it aside and didn’t pick it up again until late in 2019 when he was going through old material to donate to a college. Rereading it sparked his interest, and he finished it up while leaving most of what he wrote back then intact. A writer looking back at his career in his fifties, and then revisiting that in his eighties is unique and fascinating. One of the more interesting aspects is how Mr. Block’s attitude towards his early work-for-hire output has changed. Back in the ‘90s he refused to acknowledge or sign anything he’d written back then. These days, he cheerfully has these books reprinted either via e-books or via publishers like Hard Case Crimes. While never going so far as to say that he was ashamed of this early writing, he had various reasons for not wanting to take credit for it either back then. So explaining that shift is one of the things that benefits from letting the book sit for that long. This is also most definitely NOT a biography. While certain aspects of his personal life come it’s always in relation to explaining something related to his writing. So there are some things mentioned like the death of his father and starting a family during his first marriage, but those aren’t the focus. It’s treated mainly as the backdrop to give a reader an understanding of what the situation was when Mr. Block made a choice regarding his writing. There’s also a lot of fun stories and details about things like how the work-for-hire game was played, and how the Scott Meredith agency profited off of keeping wannabe writers on the hook for more reading fees. One trick that Mr. Block shares is how he sometimes used dialogue which often features a character wandering off the point as a a way to easily stretch out a page count for a book. This ultimately became part of his writing style. Hard core fans should also be aware there isn’t anything about how he came up with his later creations like Matt Scudder, Bernie Rhodenbarr, or Keller. Here, the culmination of the story is how he was originally inspired to start his Evan Tanner novels, and how they became the next stage where he left What we end up with isn’t so much a full historical account of Mr. Block’s life or writing. Rather it’s him looking back at his youth from two different perspectives, and how the experiences then shaped him into the writer he would become. What I loved about is the casual and sometimes wandering nature of it. It’s as if a reader sat down with Mr. Block over a cup of coffee and got to listen to him tell a bunch of stories about the old days. As a longtime fan of his, that’s a real treat. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 02, 2021
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Apr 10, 2021
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Apr 02, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 0062997335
| 9780062997333
| 0062997335
| 3.69
| 1,463
| Aug 04, 2020
| May 26, 2020
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really liked it
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Did I once meet Laura Lippman and try to mansplain one of her own characters to her? Yeah, I did. Sort of. But I swear it was an accident! More on that Did I once meet Laura Lippman and try to mansplain one of her own characters to her? Yeah, I did. Sort of. But I swear it was an accident! More on that in a moment… Here we’ve got a novelist doing a series of essays, and the topics include family, marriage, motherhood, friendships, aging, accomplishments, tragedies, regrets, sexism, and social media. While those subjects are universal, Ms. Lippman’s perspective on them is unique. After all, I don’t think there are that many former reporters turned award winning crime writers who married the guy who created The Wire. The most impressive thing about this is by focusing in on her specific circumstances Ms. Lippman can then provide insights that apply to a lot of us. For example, her and her husband had become acquainted with chef Anthony Bourdain, and his death was a hard blow for them. People all over the world mourned Bourdain, yet it’s her personal connection to him that leads to a touching examination of not just losing a friend, but also grieving celebrities we never met. In Game of Crones Ms. Lippman talks about becoming a mother. Obviously, motherhood is something that many women experience, but she had her child in her fifties so she’s outside the traditional model. She fully admits that doing this was maybe the ultimate example of white privilege. Yet by explaining why she chose to do it and how she balances her writing with raising her daughter even as her husband is absent for months at a time as part of his work, she once again highlights something that many people can relate to even if her specific circumstances are different than most people. That brings up another interesting aspect which is that despite being well off and telling stories about meeting famous people and traveling the world, Ms. Lippman still comes across as down to earth and not an entitled jerk. It helps that she goes into her middle class background, and how she struggled to find work as a low paid reporter at the start of her career while eventually writing her first books in the early mornings before work. There’s a sense of having paid her dues as well as self-awareness and gratitude about how things worked out that make you happy for her instead of jealous. (OK, I was a little jealous when she talks about being friends with several crime writers I admire.) The thing that struck me most is that even though a large part of this discusses her fears and what she thinks are her shortcomings is just how remarkably self-assured Ms. Lippman comes across. While she can mock herself and find no shortage of flaws with her own character, she’s a woman who set out to become the very person she is now, and she is pretty pleased with the results. She doesn’t think she has all the answers, and she has the same self-doubts that any sane person does. Yet, while she’ll acknowledge them, they don't paralyze her, and she doesn't let herself be stopped by other people's opinions. This gives her a distinct perspective as someone who has thought a lot about what really matters to her, and that's an oddly rare trait. Despite this confidence the one observation I might have made before I met her is that Ms. Lippman seems overly harsh in her self-criticism. The title essay about being a villainess comes from a story she tells about how she divorced her first husband, who had supported her novel writing from the start, just as she was about to hit the big time as an author. She admits to ruthlessly exploiting what she knew about him during the divorce as well as not being fully honest about her feelings that the marriage was over when they separated. She also goes on at length about her failings as a friend as well as tendency to hold grudges. I might have once argued these are just the same kind of things that a lot of people struggle with in their lives, and that doesn’t make her a villain. However, it’s thinking that Ms. Lippman was being needlessly hard on herself that led me to the incident in which I found myself mansplaining her own character to her…. I went to the 2019 Bouchercon in Dallas, and one of the authors I was hoping to meet was Ms. Lippman because I’d just finished her two most recent books and absolutely loved them. I saw her and some other writers on panel about unlikable characters, and the lead from Lady in the Lake came up. The book is set in the ‘60s and involves a woman named Maddie suddenly divorcing her husband and leaving her child with him. She finds work as a reporter and begins to dig into the recent murder of a woman. Over the course of the story Maddie shows a streak of ruthless ambition and willingness to screw anybody over to get what she wants. As I recall, during the panel Ms. Lippman was the only writer to declare that she thought her character was ‘unlikable’. I found that interesting because I had very mixed feelings about Maddie and went back and forth as to whether she was sympathetic or not. Yes, she does questionable things, but she’s also a woman trying to make it on her own in a time when that was even harder than it is today. After the panel I went to a signing session, and as Ms. Lippman autographed my books, I told her I was a new fan, and how much I loved her writing. She thanked me, and I had happened to catch her a moment when no one else was in line so we started chatting for a moment. I mentioned that I had heard what she said about Maddie on the panel, and that I was a little surprised that her opinion about the character was so much tougher than my own. She noted a couple of the specific things that Maddie did in the book that she felt weren’t forgivable, and this is where I went off the rails. I wasn’t trying to be the guy who argues with the woman who created the character. I wasn’t trying to argue at all. I was nervous and excited to have the opportunity to talk to Ms. Lippman, and what I was trying to say was that I thought she had done such a great job in making Maddie a real and complex character that despite her flaws, I still felt real empathy for her. Almost a year later, I can articulate that pretty well as I write this review. What I did in the moment was to come across as insistent that Maddie wasn’t as bad as her creator was saying, and when I realized I was botching it, I panicked. And dear reader, that’s when it happened. I interrupted Laura Lippman and started talking over her, and it very much sounded like I was saying that she was wrong. The only saving grace was that I saw the look in her eyes, realized what I was doing, and I managed to shut my big stupid mouth and say, “I’m sorry, please go on.” She was incredibly polite, and she finished the thought I’d so rudely tried to talk over. Then another fan came up to get her books signed, and so I thanked Ms. Lippman again. Then I fled in shame. I looked for an opportunity to see her again that weekend so that I could apologize, but unfortunately, I never got a chance. Now I had to read her essay Men Explain The Wire To Me with my fingers crossed hoping that there wasn’t a brief mention of the idiot in Dallas who tried to tell her about her own character. *whew* So that’s why if Laura Lippman declares that she’s a villainess, I’m just going to nod and agree. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 2020
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Sep 10, 2020
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Jul 13, 2020
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Paperback
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| unknown
| 3.68
| 2,486
| Jun 01, 2020
| Jun 01, 2020
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it was ok
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I thought I was getting an offbeat crime story about the clever theft of millions of dollar worth of nuts that were stolen from various California far
I thought I was getting an offbeat crime story about the clever theft of millions of dollar worth of nuts that were stolen from various California farmers via an elaborate scheme in which the legitimate shipping process was used to swipe truckloads of almonds. What I got instead was 4 hours of irritation. I’ve noted before that the Audible Originals that I’ve listened to aren’t really audio books, they’re podcasts. Apparently the folks at Audible got my memo because Marc Fennell flatly refers to it as “a podcast for Audible Originals” in his introduction. However, while the structure and style are trying to rip off that Serial style it's still delivered in one big chunk so I’m not sure why that intro was repeated multiple times as if these were episodes delivered week to week. Yeah, it has different chapters, but you could do some kind of break indicating that instead of having Fennell reintroduce himself and the show with the full musical theme several times. Fennell also comes across as incredibly stupid and/or naïve for repeatedly bringing up how amazed he is that anybody would steal nuts. Then when he learns that some kind of organized crime was involved he’s even more shocked. Which then leads to maybe the most idiotic question I’ve ever heard posed: “Does it surprise you that people would want to steal millions of dollars worth of nuts?” It shouldn’t surprise anybody to hear that people would want to steal millions of dollars worth of ANYTHING. Particularly when it’s an untraceable commodity that could then be quickly turned around and sold for full market value. News flash - Where there's an illegal buck to be made, then you can usually count on some kind of organized crime figures to try and get in on it. I suspect that Fennell is playing up the Gee-Whiz!-This-Is-Crazy! factor for the podcast, and he uses being an Australian in America to put some extra mustard on it. It also doesn’t help that he hits that same note repeatedly when doing things like freaking out about the guns that some security guards he interviews carry as he does a whole Wow!-America-Is-Crazy! angle. I live here, Fennell, so I’m well aware of it. My biggest gripe is that this is a perfect example of false advertising. Out of the 4 hours of this, I think there’s probably less than 45 minutes actually talking about the nut heists in detail. Which is too bad because when that’s the focus it’s an interesting account of a complex criminal scheme. Unfortunately, what Fennell really wanted to do was to use that crime story as a Trojan horse to sneak in an audio essay about how our food is grown, transported, marketed, and sold to us. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody who knows anything about capitalism, but it turns out that the whole thing is dependent on big money interests using a variety of low paid workers while destroying the environment to provide overpriced items for a market they created. As a famous quote goes, "I am shocked, SHOCKED to find out there's gambling going on in here!" And that’s an important story, but it’s not what I signed up for when I clicked on something that said it was going to be about stealing nuts. At this point in the hellish year of 2020 I really wasn’t in the mood to hear yet another example of how everything is fucked. I got Twitter for that. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 10, 2020
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Jun 10, 2020
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Jun 10, 2020
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Audible Audio
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| 1250214580
| 9781250214584
| 1250214580
| 4.03
| 2,496
| Apr 21, 2020
| Apr 21, 2020
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liked it
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I received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley for review. I will try to restrain myself and not include any quotes from the movie Tombstone in I received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley for review. I will try to restrain myself and not include any quotes from the movie Tombstone in this review. It won’t be easy. The interesting thing to me about the infamous gunfight near the O.K. Corral and its bloody aftermath is how the event has been subject to interpretation. Depending on which version of history you believe either several lawmen were valiantly standing up against a gang of criminals or a bunch of crooked officials used their badges to murder some innocent ranchers to seize control of a town. Tom Clavin follows the most generally accepted facts and seems to have come down on the side of the Earps. While they were no angels and come to Tombstone seeking fortune, the Earps look like choir boys compared to the large numbers of rustlers, thieves, and killers who were driven west by the Texas Rangers who banded together in a loose affiliation in Arizona. Time after time the Earp brothers tried to do things according to the book only to be frustrated by how the cowboys and their pals like the corrupt Sheriff Behan skirted the law. Clavin does a particularly nice job of giving the overall history of the area as well as the major and minor figures. He uses the facts to build a narrative that explains how the law, politics, business, crime, and the affections of one woman put the two sets of rivals on a collision course. While well researched it also hums along as a hell of a story so there’s no dry ole dusty history vibe to it. However, while it’s interesting and well written, I also didn’t learn anything particularly new other than a few stray bits of trivia. I also think that Clavin does put a bit of romantic sheen to the Earps with Wyatt in particular coming across as the hero who first tries to do the right thing and then goes on a revenge rampage once his family was attacked following the gunfight. That’s the general perception these days, and again, there’s an argument to be made for that interpretation. On the other hand, while I think the Earps were in the right overall, I also think that this is a story that proves that even seemingly righteous violence has a way of coming back and biting you in the ass, and there's not much consideration of that idea in the book although there is one chapter about how the gunfight might have been avoided if things played out just a little differently. Clavin also tries to spin Wyatt’s ‘vendetta ride’ as an overall victory when in truth the whole thing kind of fizzled out with no big winners or losers. It seems like everybody just lost the stomach for it and went their separate ways eventually. If you’re interested in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral this would be a great book to understand it. There’s no new real info in it, and Clavin definitely thinks Wyatt was the hero of the whole mess. Still, he provides a pretty fair and objective view of it while making the whole time and place come alive in his writing. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 19, 2020
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Apr 27, 2020
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Apr 19, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 1250182190
| 9781250182197
| 1250182190
| 4.47
| 2,906
| Dec 03, 2019
| Dec 03, 2019
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liked it
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I received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley for review. As the warrior-poet Vanilla Ice once said, “Ice ice, baby.” In 1881 Lt. Adolphus Greel I received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley for review. As the warrior-poet Vanilla Ice once said, “Ice ice, baby.” In 1881 Lt. Adolphus Greely led 24 men to Lady Franklin Bay in the Arctic where they planned to stay for 2 years while recording scientific data, exploring the area, and maybe becoming the first to reach the North Pole. Greely was a Civil War veteran who had meticulously prepared for the expedition, and he had worked up a detailed plan for resupply that had multiple contingencies in case things went wrong. Unfortunately, the military managed to completely botch any resupply and recovery efforts, and Greely and his men had to make a desperate journey to get South on their own as some of their family and friends work to mount a rescue attempt. It’s kinda like if you thought someone promised to pick you up, but they forgot. Only instead of just getting a ride with Uber, you freeze or starve to death. I’m fascinated people trying to do things in extreme conditions, and this certainly fits that bill. It’s an intriguing tale of survival, and one of the things I found most interesting was how it’s a slow-motion disaster where nobody in particular did anything you can point to as the cause of it. Greely comes across as a competent and conscientious man who did all he could to prepare for a tough mission, but by sticking strictly to the original plan he may have made a critical mistake by going South instead of trying to tough it out for one more winter in their base. Robert Todd Lincoln, son of President Abraham Lincoln, played a role as Secretary of War because his lack of enthusiasm for Arctic expeditions prevented the resupply efforts from having a lack of urgency until things became critical. Overall, bureaucracy and inexperience of some of those involved are the reasons why it ended in disaster. There’s a lot of great descriptive writing of the environment and conditions that really drive home the perils of trying to travel in the Arctic, and there’s enough background on all the major people to give you a sense of who they were without getting bogged down in multiple biographies. There’s a real sense of what life was like for Greely and his men both before and after things went badly. Frankly, the only reason I’m giving this 3 stars instead of 4 isn’t really the author’s fault. Once things go badly, and the expedition essentially finds itself trapped then it turns into a extended tale of starvation and frostbite. That’s just not a lot of fun to read about, and while Levy juxtaposes it with the rescue efforts so that it doesn't come across as a slog, it does start to feel like an extended horror movie in the last third of the book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 29, 2019
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Dec 02, 2019
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Nov 29, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 1501137239
| 9781501137235
| 1501137239
| 3.83
| 1,091
| Oct 22, 2019
| Oct 22, 2019
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really liked it
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At various points Harry Houdini lied about where he was born, when he was born, how he met his wife, and he routinely got fictional accounts of his es
At various points Harry Houdini lied about where he was born, when he was born, how he met his wife, and he routinely got fictional accounts of his escapes in newspapers. Hell, Harry Houdini wasn’t even his real name. So how do you write a biography about a man whose entire life was built around tricking people and sensationalizing himself? What the writer has done here is to focus less on the details of Houdini’s life. Sure, we get the basic facts and educated guesses when necessary, and there’s a lot about various Houdini legends while comparing them to reality. However, that’s not the main point of this book. Instead of trying to figure out who Houdini was and how he accomplished what he did, the book is more interested in examining how Houdini continues to fascinate and inspire people to this day. Considering that this was a man who whose very name became synonymous with amazing escapes of any kind, that’s an interesting topic. Here’s the odd thing for me. I don't really care about magic, and I'm not even that interested in Houdini although he certainly led a memorable life. So why did I read this? Because I am a big fan of Joe Posnanski. Posnanski is a sportswriter who was an award winning columnist in Kansas City for many years, and if I had a nickel for every story I read that he wrote about a horrible Royals teams during that time I’d be richer than Bill Gates. I met him once, and he signed a copy of his wonderful book about Buck O’Neil, The Soul of Baseball. I’ve listened to the podcast he does with TV producer Michael Schur and I have even ordered the dish named after him, Posnanski Chicken Spiedini, at a restaurant called Governor Stumpy’s on more a few occasions. (Not only is it really good, but you get a huge portion that gives you great take home leftovers for another meal.) The fascinating thing about Posnanski to me is that he isn’t your typical 21st century hot-take sports guy. By modern standards his sports writing could almost be called gentle, and he always seems to be looking for the bright side without seeming naive. He is almost effortlessly funny, too. The thing that really always stood out was that Joe had a knack for finding awe inspiring moments in places that might be overlooked. I always had the feeling that part of the reason he was a sports fan is that it’s a thing where somebody doing something unbelievable is always just a play away. However, Joe left Kansas City years ago, and while he’s had several high profile sports writing jobs since, I’ve missed getting a dose of that that kind of optimism a few times a week when I cracked open a open a copy of the Star. Truth be told, I’ve drifted away from watching sports at all in recent years so I don’t seek out Joe’s writing like I used to. I did get a nice reminder of it when a story he wrote about taking his daughter to see Hamilton went viral that made Lin-Manuel Miranda cry. So even though I’ve got little interest in magicians, I picked this up just to read some Joe Posnanski. And he delivers by giving us a story about wonder. Houdini might have been a bully, a liar, a jerk, and a shameless self-promoter, but as repeatedly gets pointed out, he was the ultimate showman with a relentless drive. The legend of Houdini has inspired countless other magicians and escape artists, and those are the stories that Posnanski is really telling us here. He wants to figure out why a flawed man whose main talent was putting himself in rigged situations to escape from has managed to flourish in the public imagination for decades after his death. To try and answer that Joe talks to everybody from David Copperfield to a reclusive former actor who wrote an incredibly detailed book about Houdini that is nearly impossible to find. Along the way we hear about magic acts, tricks of the escape artist trade, debates about Houdini’s actual skill, and a variety of other topics that all are oriented around trying to puzzle out the appeal of the man. In the end I did learn a lot about Houdini, and it also gave me a lot to think about in terms of what creates legendary fame and how one person's image can inspire countless people long after they're gone. If you’re thinking about reading it, and you’re not sure if it’s your cup of tea, here’s a link to the column Posnanski wrote about taking his daughter to see Hamilton . If you enjoy that, there’s a good chance you’ll like this book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 11, 2019
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Nov 15, 2019
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Nov 11, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0062242164
| 9780062242167
| 0062242164
| 3.62
| 4,920
| Jan 01, 2014
| Oct 14, 2014
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liked it
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If you ever thought that writers like James Ellroy exaggerate the corruption of old Hollywood, try reading this. The murder of influential film directo If you ever thought that writers like James Ellroy exaggerate the corruption of old Hollywood, try reading this. The murder of influential film director William Desmond Taylor has so many viable suspects and motives that it could be the plot for a sequel to Knives Out. For starters, despite being a well-respected figure in the movie industry Taylor was a man who had secrets like a wife and daughter that he had abandoned years before coming to Hollywood and changing his name. He may have also been gay or bisexual, and there were rumors that he had frequented opium dens. Taylor had already been burned by one man who found out who he really was. His former butler had learned about his former life before stealing from Taylor and vanishing. He was a prime suspect in the murder, but the press latched on to theories that said that Taylor had been killed by a woman as a result of some kind of romantic entanglement. Mary Miles Minter was a young starlet infatuated with Taylor which made her domineering mother furious even as Taylor didn’t return her affections. Another actress, Mabel Norman, was trying to put her life and career back together with Taylor’s help after breaking a drug addiction, and there was wild speculation that Mabel or one of her former dealers angry at Taylor’s efforts to keep her clean might have done it. Another small-time actress named Margaret ‘Gibby’ Gibson wasn’t implicated at the time, but her deathbed confession to killing Taylor decades later would lead many to believe that it was a blackmail attempt by Gibson and some friends of hers that led to murder. This book leans into the idea that the crime might have been solved back in 1922 if it wasn’t the studio using its influence to steer the police and the press in certain directions. Powerful executive Adolph Zukor already had his hands full holding off reformers and government regulations in the face of scandal, and his minions took all of Taylor’s papers from his house before the police could read them. Later, the papers they gave to investigators may have been cherry picked to lead the police towards Minter and Norman since letting one or two actresses get pummeled in the press and by ‘moralists’ across the country was preferable to having all of Hollywood’s dirty laundry come out at that critical time. Overall, this is an interesting look at an unsolved mystery. and Mann seems to do a credible job of sticking to the known facts. The backdrop of Zukor trying to hold onto power as he battled reformers is interesting in itself. I particularly found the story of Will Hays fascinating. It’s weird how things evolved so that he’d eventually have to found the infamous Hays Code which would stifle movies for decades even as he was not a moralizing reformer himself, and he was deeply uncomfortable with the idea that he should be a censor or in charge of doing things like banning Arbuckle from making movies. Unfortunately, Mann falls into the true-crime trap of falling in love with a theory and presenting it as the only possible solution when that’s not the case. Here, he spends a lot of time following Margaret Gibson and her blackmail accomplices to establish how he thinks they were involved later and how their activities indicate a pattern that might have been used on Taylor. And that’s certainly possible, but there’s no new evidence to prove that. Yet, Mann presents this as the obvious solution while blowing by the parts that don’t fit or point to other people. His ideas about how a conspiracy within the studio to steer the cops wrong and throwing their own people like Minter and Norman under the bus while protecting someone like Gibson seems especially shaky. So if you’re interested it’s good for understanding the basic facts and context of what happened, but wary of the places where Mann speculates without considering alternatives. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 08, 2019
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Dec 19, 2019
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Nov 08, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0312942362
| 9780312942366
| B0073QW4ZS
| 4.00
| 3,307
| Nov 01, 1988
| Jan 01, 2006
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really liked it
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In 1981 Ken McElroy was shot dead in his pick-up truck while parked on a main street of Skidmore, Missouri. At least two people fired on him, and doze
In 1981 Ken McElroy was shot dead in his pick-up truck while parked on a main street of Skidmore, Missouri. At least two people fired on him, and dozens of people were nearby and witnessed the shooting. Yet not one person checked on McElroy, and his body sat there for an hour until the authorities had finally been called. No one has ever been charged with the murder because nobody in the crowd would tell the police who did it. Think about that the next time you hear how polite and nice people in the heartland of America are. What In Broad Daylight does brilliantly is explain how some ordinary people were driven to murder, and why an entire community would refuse to tell the cops who did it. The simple answer is that Ken McElroy was an asshole. This is a guy who for years had stolen livestock, grain, equipment, supplies, antiques, and anything else he could get his hands on from farmers all around northwest Missouri and other nearby states. Despite being arrested and charged multiple times for various crimes he kept getting away with it by keeping a very good criminal lawyer from Kansas City on retainer as well as intimidating any potential accusers or witnesses. McElroy would do things like park for hours outside the homes of those he was angry with, and there were several incidents of him threatening people with guns. He also committed multiple acts of statutory rape, and when one underage girl’s parents made too much of a fuss about McElroy 'dating' their daughter, he burned their house down. He shot three men who all lived to testify against him in court, but McElroy escaped conviction on the first two incidents. It was only the shooting of the last man, elderly grocery store owner Bo Bowenkamp, which finally convinced a jury to say that McElroy was guilty of a crime. It was McElroy’s extended campaign of harassment of several locals before and after the shooting of Bowenkamp that made the town’s fear and frustration with the bully boil over. I grew up in a small Kansas town just about an hour from Skidmore, and I was 11 when McElroy died so I remember a lot of talk about the incident. However, after reading this I realized that I hadn’t known many details, and that I had some fundamental misunderstandings about what happened there. I didn't comprehend just what a total sonofabitch that Ken McElroy was. He got referred to as the town bully, but that doesn’t really tell you the scope of his criminality, how bad his intimidation tactics were, and how easy it was to get on his bad side. As an example, McElroy’s beef with Bo Bowenkamp began over a simple misunderstanding when McElroy’s four year old daughter tried to walk out of the store without paying for a few pieces of candy. This minor incident drove McElroy into an extended rage that had him harassing the Bowenkamps for months by parking outside their store and home. He’d frequently fire shotguns over their house in the middle of the night. People stopped shopping at the store out of fear that McElroy would see them and start coming after them, too. Eventually, McElroy shot and nearly killed Bowenkamp one night in back of the store. McElroy even pulled this stuff on cops and got away with it. One state trooper had regular clashes with him, and he arrested McElroy for the Bowenkamp shooting. While on trial and out on bail for that crime he began parking outside that cop’s home and once pointed a shotgun at his wife. McElroy only stopped after the trooper used a friend of his to deliver a message that if McElroy didn’t quit that the trooper was going to catch him out on a gravel road one dark night and deliver some instant justice. So if cops were that threatened, imagine how the citizens of Skidmore felt. I’d always been under the impression that the killing of McElroy was simple mob justice by organized vigilantes. However, the people of Skidmore had endured years of Ken McElroy’s reign of terror. Time and again someone would turn to the law for help only to be told that nothing could be done, or even if he got charged his lawyer would get him off while McElroy made the life of anyone involved a living hell. The crowd there the day that McElroy was killed was even due to continued efforts to do things legally because they’d gathered as solidarity and security for four men who were going to testify about McElroy’s brandishing a rifle in the bar while threatening to kill Bowenkamp. This was part of an effort to get McElroy’s bail revoked while his appeal of the conviction was pending. However, they were enraged when McElroy’s lawyer got yet another postponement, and this turned into an impromptu meeting about options and organizing themselves to watch and protect the four men until the court date. That’s when McElroy, who had heard about the gathering, decided to show his ass yet again by driving into town and having a beer. That turned out to be the final straw that drove a couple of people to take advantage of the opportunity to finally be rid of the guy. Then the town closed ranks because they felt that the shooters had finally dealt with a problem that the legal system had failed to resolve time after time. This wasn’t frontier mob justice done in haste, it was a bunch of frightened and angry people pushed far past the breaking point. I’ll give a lot of credit to Harry MacLean for the way he depicts this part of the world. As I stated before, I grew up in a small town like Skidmore in that area during the same time frame, and he absolutely nails life in farm country during the ‘80s. From describing the landscape to the weather to the depictions of the local people, this really took me back. In fact, my home town is even mentioned, and one of the cops who crossed paths with McElroy was a man I knew. My one complaint is that MacLean goes a little easy on the people of Skidmore although I generally agree that this was a failure of the system, not a bad town. While MacLean does touch on the local Midwest farmer mentality of people-should-take-care-of-their-own-problems and how that was part of how McElroy managed to isolate his targets, he also kind of lets them off the hook for not looking out for each other more until McElroy was finally convicted of shooting Bowenkamp. That’s when people started to finally push back. Obviously, the main problem was McElroy and how he manipulated the legal system, but if the town had collectively stood up to him sooner it might not have come the bloody end it eventually did. So who killed Ken McElroy? The book gives the most likely candidates, but as MacLean points out, knowing who actually pulled the trigger doesn’t really matter. The story here is in how Ken McElroy was allowed to behave the way he did for so long, and how he managed to push an entire town of people so far that almost every one of them felt like he had it coming. ...more |
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Oct 15, 2019
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Oct 22, 2019
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Oct 15, 2019
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Paperback
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| B07H7RYQ5P
| 4.44
| 8,193
| Nov 15, 2018
| Nov 15, 2018
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liked it
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This isn’t really a book. It’s a podcast. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing because I like podcasts. In fact, I’ve listened to several This isn’t really a book. It’s a podcast. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing because I like podcasts. In fact, I’ve listened to several hours of them about the Golden State Killer already. The difference is that those I downloaded for free while I used one of my monthly credits for this Audible Original so I’m feeling a little cheated. Plus, I already had read or heard about 99% of the information in here already so calling it 'the untold story' isn't exactly true either. In fairness, it’s pretty well done as far as giving an account of GSK, and the story of how cold case detective Paul Holes helped identify him by using genealogical DNA information which ultimately led to the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo is fascinating. I could have lived without the spooky musical cues which reminded me of a trashy tabloid TV show, but with multiple interviews of victims, cops, and others involved in the case it does make for a good summary of the whole complicated story. If you don’t know much about it, and you have a spare Audible credit then you could do a lot worse. However, if you’ve really want to do deeper dive into this terrifying story then I’d highly recommend starting with the late Michelle McNamara’s brilliant book I'll Be Gone in the Dark. (One of the parts I very much liked was Paul Holes emotionally talking about McNamara as he tells the story of how she came to feel like his investigative partner before her untimely death.) The true crime podcast Casefile also did an in-depth multi-part account of the history of GSK before he was caught that is very informative about his crimes. The HLN podcast Unmasking A Killer came out shortly before GSK was arrested, and then it added several episodes about the arrest and what we learned about DeAngelo after that. A lot of the info I heard there first is repeated here. So again, this isn’t bad, but if you’ve already spent time following this whole case you won’t find out anything you haven’t read or heard before. ...more |
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Aug 06, 2019
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Aug 09, 2019
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Aug 06, 2019
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| 3.83
| 4,642
| Jul 04, 2019
| Jul 04, 2019
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really liked it
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I was reading something about the 50th anniversary of the moon landing recently, and one thing that caught my eye was that apparently over 400,000 peo
I was reading something about the 50th anniversary of the moon landing recently, and one thing that caught my eye was that apparently over 400,000 people worked on various projects related to making that happen. I’d say that out of all them, the contribution of John Houbolt may be the most controversial. Houbolt was an engineer at NASA who became an advocate for Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. In the early days of trying to get to the moon most everyone thought that the way to do it was to either build an enormous rocket that would make the entire round trip or that a ship would have to be assembled in Earth orbit and then sent to the moon. The thing about LOR was that by taking a light landing craft it would save having to get an enormous amount of weight, mostly fuel, to the moon and back. The problem was that it would mean that two spacecraft would have to rendezvous in lunar orbit, and at a time when nobody had docked in Earth orbit yet that seemed extremely dangerous, maybe even impossible. So when most of the NASA committees and big wigs were trying to make decisions the idea of LOR was usually quickly crossed off the list. However, Houbolt had done an extensive analysis of the numbers, and to him it was clear that LOR was the only way to get to the moon by the deadline John F. Kennedy had set for the country so he started to relentlessly push the idea even when he was dismissed out of hand. Sometimes he was met with outright hostility like when another engineer angrily declared that Houbolt’s numbers were a lie in a meeting with some of the top NASA people. Although frequently hurt and frustrated, Houbolt refused to take no for an answer and continued to push LOR, and he even risked his job by skipping the chain of command and sending letters and his report to one of the top men in NASA. Eventually the tide turned and LOR was adopted as the strategy to get to the moon. Yet, Houbolt was almost immediately shut out, and many in NASA began downplaying his role. Houbolt would end up leaving the agency just months after the decision was made, and for the rest of his life he’d insist that he hadn’t received the credit he was due. The counterpoint to that is that Houbolt didn’t create the idea of LOR, he was just a believer who pushed it. So the NASA attitude was often that while Houbolt was an early advocate for LOR that other people were also studying it too, and that the idea was so logical that it surely would have been used even without Houbolt’s efforts. The other odd factor is that Houbolt did, in fact, receive a lot of recognition. NASA awarded him a commendation at the time, he was interviewed and profiled in the media including Time magazine, he was invited back to NASA to witness the moon landing from Mission Control where Werner von Braun thanked him personally, and his old hometown gave him a parade and named a street after him. Houbolt and his struggle were even briefly depicted in the HBO mini-series From the Earth to the Moon back in 1998 so it’s not like he’d been completely ignored and forgotten. However, Houbolt was eventually denied a large cash award thanks to a NASA executive downplaying his importance so maybe that’s why he seemed to feel like he wasn’t given his due. Another interesting aspect explored in this is that while LOR was probably the only way that America could have gotten to the moon by 1970, it might have been a mistake for long term space exploration. Some engineers were envisioning a whole orbital infrastructure that would be used to not just go to the moon, but beyond. By doing it the quickest way possible to make an arbitrary deadline NASA may have inadvertently set manned space exploration back by decades. I very much enjoyed this as an Audible original I got as one of their freebies. There’s not really enough here for an entire non-fiction book, but the 3 ½ hours audio presentation including interviews and historical clips is just about the perfect way to learn about Houbolt and this story. It seems more like listening to a long NPR feature or podcast episode instead of a book, but it’s an intriguing side story for anyone interested in the Apollo landings. ...more |
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Jul 26, 2019
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| Apr 02, 2019
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really liked it
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Even though I’m a huge fan of mystery/crime fiction I’ve long known that I never could have been a cop. One of the main reasons is that if I were face
Even though I’m a huge fan of mystery/crime fiction I’ve long known that I never could have been a cop. One of the main reasons is that if I were faced with a suspect I knew was lying to me that I lack the patience to work the truth out of them with long interrogations. Instead I’d immediately shine a bright light in their eyes and grab the nearest phone book. That was never clearer to me then while reading this book when I found myself gritting my teeth and wishing I could reach through the pages to choke the shit out of this lying asshole. In the spring of 1975 two pre-teen sisters, Sheila and Kate Lyon, vanished from a suburban Maryland mall just outside of Washington D.C. Despite a huge police investigation and being covered all over local media the girls were never found. Almost 40 years later a cold case detective was going through the file again and came across something new. Days after the girls disappeared, an 18 year old man named Lloyd Welch had given a statement to the police about seeing them talking with a man at the mall and leaving with him in a car. However, Welch’s statement seemed fishy, and he promptly flunked a lie detector test which led to him admitting that it was a combination of things he’d seen in the news and made up. The cops dismissed him as just another attention seeking kook that was wasting their time. However, this detective noticed that Welch’s statement about the man he claimed to have seen had a detail that matched his prime suspect, a child molester who had died in prison. Believing Welch may know something after all the cops tracked him down only to find that he was serving a long prison term for molesting a young girl. It also turned out that one composite sketch from a witness in the mall at the time looked a lot like Welch at 18. What began there was a series of long interviews with Welch who they quickly learned seem almost allegoric to telling the truth. When caught in a lie Welch would refuse to admit it, blaming any mistakes on faulty memory brought about by age and drug abuse, while eventually shifting to a completely different story that ignored what he previously said. Or he might backtrack and start repeating a story the police had already discredited. When faced with absolute proof of false statements and finally admitting something he’d say he lied because he was scared and trying to protecting himself. Pinning Welch down to a story was like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall, and it took a team of detectives working variations on several different tactics for over a year to eventually tease something approaching the truth out of him. This would lead to new directions and other suspects involved in the crime which were mainly members of Welch’s family. They would turn out to be a clan of transplanted hillbillies that seem to be something out of a Rob Zombie movie with child abuse and sexual assault being common place. Mark Bowen was a young journalist just starting his career when he reported on the missing Lyon sisters, and as he explains the case haunted him for years afterwards. He’s done some interesting things structurally with this because it doesn’t follow your typical true crime format. The story begins with Lloyd Welch and that’s where most of the focus is. There’s not a lot of time spent on the original abduction which is what you’d usually get in a true crime story. Then there’d be some background on the family, the investigation, and the break with Welch might come in at the halfway point. Bowen gives us that as background and essentially starts very early with the cops going to Welch. That’s because this is mainly about the interviews and how the cops managed to tease and cajole information from Welch when he was feeding them mostly bullshit, and then how they kept him talking long past the point where he realizes that he should just shut up. That makes sense because this case hinges on how they eventually learned to read what Welch was telling them and how to work him. In the end the major break comes not from what Lloyd actually said, but instead from a detective following up on one his lies but realizing that the truth was actually in the other details Welch kept putting in his various stories. This is an interesting way to do a book like this, and the case is fascinating. However, it can also be frustrating because a great deal of time is spent just reading Welch’s shifting lies and repeated justifications. It also doesn’t end as neatly as an episode of Law & Order. While some justice is done there is still a lot left unanswered and probably some guilty parties will never be charged. It’s a solid piece of crime true crime writing, but reading about Welch wore me out. I don’t know how the cops who had to actually deal with him could stand it. ...more |
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Apr 08, 2019
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Apr 15, 2019
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Apr 03, 2019
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| 4.12
| 242,865
| Feb 27, 2018
| Feb 27, 2018
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really liked it
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**Update 4/26/2018 - When this book was published it was an unsolved mystery. It got a happy ending yesterday.** I'd heard about Michelle McNamara befo **Update 4/26/2018 - When this book was published it was an unsolved mystery. It got a happy ending yesterday.** I'd heard about Michelle McNamara before I even knew her name or that she was a true crime writer. She was married to comedian/actor Patton Oswalt, who I’m a big fan of, and several of his bits over the years have involved his wife. Per Patton’s descriptions in his routines she was a brilliant woman, far smarter than him, who was always operating at a whole other level. Now I know what he was talking about after reading this book. It’s about a pure monster that should be one of the best known unsolved crime cases in American history, but many people have probably never heard of the Golden State Killer. It began in 1976 with a serial rapist terrorizing the suburbs of Sacramento. His MO was to break into homes in the middle of the night and surprise sleeping victims who he’d threaten with knives or guns. He often targeted couples or families and would rape a woman while her husband or boyfriend was tied up helpless in the next room. He’s also believed to have shot and killed a couple who had the misfortune to encounter him while out walking their dog. His attacks spread to communities outside of San Francisco, but seemed to stop in mid-1979. Unfortunately, GSK had just moved south to the LA area where he started up again, but his first known attempt was thwarted when the couple fought back, and he narrowly escaped capture. Instead of scaring him off this triggered an escalation after which GSK would kill those he attacked until stopping in 1986, ten years after he began. The full extent of the damage he’d done wasn’t known until DNA typing of cold cases was done in 2001. This confirmed what several detectives in various jurisdictions had suspected for years. The man called the East Area Rapist (EAR) during his crime spree in northern California was the same man who’d become known as the Original Night Stalker (ONS) in the southern part of the state. The statistics of his victims alone are staggering with over 50 women sexually assaulted and 12 murders. He may have also been responsible for a series of break-ins in Visalia a few years earlier, and if so there’s another murder to hang on him there for shooting a man who stopped an intruder from abducting his daughter in the middle of the night from their home. It was Michelle McNamara who branded him the Golden State Killer after she began writing about the case on her blog and in magazine articles. She had became interested in true crime as a teenager after an unsolved murder of a young girl happened near her home. A big part of this story is about how this case came to obsess her, and she does not make an attempt to gloss over how much it took over her life. She has one story of asking her husband to leave a movie premiere party because of a new lead she was given that she couldn’t wait to get back to her laptop to start working on it. There’s another heartbreaking moment when she describes an anniversary dinner with Patton where she realized that not only had he given her gifts two years in a row based on her on-going work on GSK, but that she had been so consumed that she’d forgotten to get him anything at all. Unfortunately, Michelle died unexpectedly in 2016 while in the middle of writing this book. Two of her fellow researchers finished it at Patton’s urging, and I’m very glad that happened because it would have been a shame if the work she did on this hadn’t been revealed so fully. She was an incredibly gifted writer who can provide detail about GSK’s crime in such a way that we feel the full weight of what he did, and how incredibly scary this story is. It’s there as she details the evidence the police found that showed that GSK was a relentless night prowler who crept over fences, through backyards, across rooftops, and peeped windows from the shadows. It’s in the way she tells us the stories from the victims who were very often sound asleep in their beds and were awoken by a man wearing a ski mask shining a light in their eyes, showing them a knife, and telling them that he’d kill them if they didn’t do exactly what he said. While it never feels exploitive she conveys all the ways that the surviving victim’s lives were changed by the attacks on them. When she describes a detective’s years of chasing dead ends you can feel the frustration, and when she tells the story of a new lead you also start tapping into the hope that this might be the one to break the case. In addition to being a great writer Michelle was a relentless researcher. I sometimes have issues with books or documentaries about true crime cases because I think it too often it shows confirmation bias or prefers wild conspiracy theories to more likely mundane facts and scenarios. She avoids those by imposing clear and logical standards to this which depended on fact checking and interviews rather than indulging in hunches or pet theories. It’s very clear from what she wrote here that Michelle believed that this case could be solved with technology. The cops have the DNA of the Golden State Killer to use as the ultimate determination of guilt or innocence. Geo-Mapping his crime scenes should give an approximate location of where he lived. Scanning old case files and using key word recognition and data sorting can bring previously hidden connections to life. DNA databases are growing all the time, and all it takes is one hit from a relative to narrow it down to the family.* Michelle was convinced that GSK’s identity was in the existing evidence somewhere, and it’s just a matter of sifting through all the clues to find it. Because of her death there several parts that rely on her early drafts, notes, old magazine articles, and even a tape she made of the conversation between her and a police detective while showing her some of the GSK’s crime scenes. That gives the book a bit of a disjointed feeling and makes you wish even more that she’d been able to finish it herself, but considering the circumstances it’s unavoidable and doesn’t prevent the full story from being told. This will be going on my Best-of-True-Crime shelf, right next to In Cold Blood. And if they do ever catch the Golden State Killer I’ll bet it’s going to be due in no small part to the work of Michelle McNamara. * This is exactly how the police eventually tracked him down. ...more |
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Mar 07, 2018
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Mar 14, 2018
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Jan 31, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0671528904
| 9780671528904
| 0671528904
| 4.09
| 72,136
| Oct 31, 1995
| Aug 01, 1996
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liked it
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This review is going to be as much about comparing it to the new Netflix series as it is the book itself. You have been warned. John Douglas was a FBI This review is going to be as much about comparing it to the new Netflix series as it is the book itself. You have been warned. John Douglas was a FBI agent who spent most of his career working for its Behavioral Science Unit. Along with other agents Douglas interviewed a wide variety of violent offenders including such notorious figures as Charles Manson, Richard Speck, and David Berkowitz, and then he tried to apply what they learned to develop criminal profiles of active unsolved cases. If you’ve ever read the books of Thomas Harris like Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs or seen the movies or TV show based on them then you might be familiar with the character of Jack Crawford who was based on Douglas. Over the course of his career he worked on famous cases like the ‘80s Atlanta child murders and the Green River Strangler. This is your basic true crime stuff written by a law enforcement professional. Douglas gives us his background as a fairly aimless youth who ended up as an FBI agent by pure chance and found that he had a taste and talent for digging into the history of criminals to see what made them tick. The book mixes his war stories of cases he worked along with a fair amount of bitching about the criminal justice system, and a little griping about he sometimes felt ill-treated by the FBI. He sprinkles his story with tidbits of his meetings with serial killers, and brags a fair amount about how accurate his profiles turned out to be for several cases he worked. In fact, you sometimes get the impression that the only reason that there are active killers who haven’t been caught was because someone failed to heed his advice. In fairness, Douglas does spread a lot of credit around to his fellow agents and local cops he worked with over the years, and he goes out of his way to note that the agents of his department are essentially consultants who don’t catch criminals themselves. The guy did dedicate his professional life to studying the worst of the worst in the hopes of finding better ways to identify and catch them in the future. While that’s obviously a noble calling you do get a sense of smugness and self aggrandizement from him at times. You can tell that he gets a huge kick out of playing Sherlock Holmes and dropping predictions on people that turn out to be right, but there’s a notable absence of him ever being wrong about any of them other than minor discrepancies. What’s most interesting about this book is how it was adapted into the a TV series. The first season of the show is about the early days of the Behavioral Science Unit when they were still coming up with the terminology and methodology they’d use to research and study violent offenders in prison. Douglas and fellow profiler Robert Ressler have been turned into fictionalized characters, but the killers and their crimes are historically accurate. Many of the scenes and stories are drawn from this book, but using created characters as the leads frees them up to add more drama as well as pick and choose their spots on the non-fiction bits. So while Douglas certainly has had a colorful career and has many interesting things to say I found it a lot more satisfying as a TV show than a book. Also, if you’re watching and liking Mindhunter be sure to check out Zodiac which producer/director David Fincher also did. ...more |
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Nov 09, 2017
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Nov 22, 2017
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Nov 09, 2017
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 1250089018
| 9781250089014
| 1250089018
| 3.67
| 7,864
| May 24, 2016
| May 24, 2016
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liked it
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I received a free copy from the publisher for review. A reporter who had been fired for his refusal to kill a story about a politician’s sex scandal go I received a free copy from the publisher for review. A reporter who had been fired for his refusal to kill a story about a politician’s sex scandal goes into a strip club and during a lap dance he strikes up a conversation that helps reignite his passion for writing true crime stories. So he decides to look into the disappearance of a college student that sends him down a self-destructive path as he copes with some ugly family history as well as fears about his own nature. This sounds like the setup for a pretty good fiction thriller with a flawed protagonist becoming obsessed with a mystery to avoid dealing with his own problems, but it’s one of those cases where the facts are probably stranger than any fiction a crime writer could dream up. On February 9, 2004, nursing student Maura Murray vanished under puzzling circumstances after suddenly leaving the University of Massachusetts Amherst and driving over two hours north. She was last seen following a minor car accident on a rural road but refused help from a passing school bus driver who went to his nearby home and called the police. Even though only minutes passed from the time that Maura spoke to the bus driver until the first police officer arrived there was no sign of her. In 2009 James Renner had just settled a lawsuit related to his wrongful termination as a newspaper reporter when he decided to dig into the disappearance of Maura. He’d find the family surprisingly uncooperative because usually the loved ones of missing people are anxious for publicity to keep the case in the public mind. With limited information and a belief that journalism today requires total transparency Renner decided to take an open approach to his research of posting information and updates on a blog, and this attracted a group of internet armchair detectives anxious to help who would provide information and tips related to the case. It also took a dark turn when someone began posting creepy YouTube clips that seem to be hinting towards knowledge of what happened to Maura as well as eventually making Renner’s family the subject of unsettling videos. This is one of those books that I find myself of two minds about. As a non-fiction tale of a writer getting unhealthily obsessed with a missing woman as a way of coping with and/or avoiding his own issues it’s an extremely interesting page turner. It’s also got an intriguing mystery at the heart of it because the more Renner digs into Maura Murray’s life the more evident it becomes that this was a young woman with problems, and there’s a lot of things to question and speculate about including the odd behavior of her father and her history of petty crime. However, I always find myself extremely wary when the public gets interested in unsolved cases. It’s really easy for cable news, schlock documentaries, and click-bait websites to exploit these. Even when a story is done well with a painstakingly researched and unbiased look at a case like the Serial podcast’s first season it makes me uneasy because it seems to inspire the interwebs to unleash the worst kind of speculative nonsense without regard to facts or the realization that most crime is depressingly mundane and that it’s almost never the result of a flashy serial killer or a conspiracy of some kind. (I’m not immune to this either. I spent more time than I like to admit poring over the cell phone logs and tower maps posted on the Serial website coming up with my own theory. So I totally understand the allure of a true crime mystery. I just don’t trust the average interwebs user’s ability to solve one. That includes me.) People are prone to indulging our inherent biases when we try to figure out what happened during some mysterious event, and we are remarkably stubborn about not letting facts get in the way of what we want to believe. We also like to turn anything unexplained into a larger story that follows our own internal sense of logic and will incorporate any random scrap of knowledge that seems to support a pet theory. All of these things tend to combine to turn any case that catches the public eye into a clusterfuck of any wild theories the human mind can concoct, and it seems like the result is often a murky swamp of rumors, half-truths, misunderstandings, and outright lies that make it nigh on impossible to separate fact from fiction. If you send a bunch of hounds into the woods baying after a fox it’s impossible to track the fox later because its paw prints will have been obliterated by the dogs. I’m not saying that Renner exploited Maura’s disappearance or was irresponsible in his reporting here. He’s got a variety of reasons for becoming obsessed with the case, and as he points out he probably would have made more money by simply writing another novel. For the most part he does do what seems to be a reliable job of research, discounting crackpot notions, and sticking to the facts. However, he also isn’t above thinking that coincidences are the universe's way of telling you something, visiting a psychic, tossing in the idea that the world as we know it is really just a computer simulation, and describing a couple of weird incidents that make his son sound like a character in a Stephen King novel. At the end of the day Renner has got his own theory about what happened to Maura. His idea isn’t outlandish and there is evidence to support it, but I do question if he didn’t fall into the rabbit hole of looking for a reason Maura disappeared when the answer might be a lot more meaningless and random than what he believes. I suspect that if ever do learn of Maura’s fate that the answer will turn out to be surprisingly simple. While this digging into an on-going mystery hit on some personal pet peeves of mine with the true crime genre, I still found Renner’s story and writing compelling overall. He also seems like a decent guy who was struggling with a lot, and the book made me hope that things got better for him after he wrote it. Maura Murray’s story almost certainly doesn’t have a happy ending, but there’s still hope for James Renner. ...more |
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Jun 02, 2016
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Jun 04, 2016
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Jun 02, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 4.22
| 183,784
| Apr 26, 2004
| Mar 29, 2005
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really liked it
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Like a lot of people I’ve been listening to the Hamilton musical album non-stop and read this because it was the source of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s inspir
Like a lot of people I’ve been listening to the Hamilton musical album non-stop and read this because it was the source of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s inspiration to create the brilliant Broadway show. The idea that a dense biography of an American Founding Father who was probably best known to the general public as the guy on the the ten dollar bill and the subject of a pretty funny Got Milk? commercial would someday lead to the creation of an incredibly popular musical that blends show tunes with hip-hop is only a little less likely than the life of Alexander Hamilton himself. (And if you’re interested in reading a great account of the impact the show has on people I highly recommend this article that sportswriter Joe Posnanski wrote about taking his daughter to see it.) The circumstances of Hamilton’s birth on a Caribbean island as the illegitimate son of a divorced woman and a fortune seeking Scotsman were the first strike against him, and things only got worse when his father abandoned him and his mother died. As an orphan with no money and an embarrassing social status for the time young Alexander probably should have lived a short, hard life and been forgotten by history. However, he also had a brilliant mind, a talent for writing, and an enormous appetite for work that was fueled by relentless ambition. After a hurricane devastated his island Hamilton wrote an account of the tragedy so moving that a collection was taken up to send him to America to attend college. Hamilton arrived in New York just as the American Revolution was about to start, and his talents landed him a pivotal position on George Washington’s staff as well leading troops in the field and playing a key role during the Battle of Yorktown that essentially won the war. Hamilton’s role in the writing of The Federalist with James Madison and John Jay along with his political maneuvering was critical in getting the Constitution ratified. HIs biggest contributions to the United States probably came from his bold actions as the first secretary of the treasury when he not only got the young nation on sound economic footing but also used money as a tool to link the fates of the frequently bickering states together as a way of achieving unity and promoting a strong federal government. As Washington’s most trusted advisor Hamilton was critical in shaping the future of the country he did so much to help create. All of this should have meant that Hamilton would be remembered as one of the most important figures in American history but he also made powerful enemies including Thomas Jefferson. The struggle between those who believed power should reside in the federal government or with the states became a bitter fight in which Hamilton was the victim of relentless political attacks that slandered his reputation and made him a perpetual lightning rod of controversy. The conflict would lead to the creation of the two party political system as well as a constant tug of war between factions about how much authority the American government should have that continues today. Hamilton frequently didn’t do himself any favors with his outspoken nature, and his insecurities about his illegitimacy caused him to be hypersensitive to insults. His basic cynicism and mistrust of people made him wary of popular trends and leaving the fate of America in the hands of the general public who he felt could be too easily swayed by a mob mentality and demagogues. (Geez, where could he have gotten that idea?) This left him vulnerable to attacks by his enemies who smeared him as an elitist at best or a schemer plotting to return America to English control or set up an American monarchy at worst. He badly hurt his own political party by feuding with President John Adams who became another enemy who would smear Hamilton long after his death. Hamilton also had the distinction of being one of the first American politicians to be caught up in a sex scandal, and his reaction to it by publishing a tell-all memoir called The Reynolds Pamphlet was a miscalculation that severely damaged his public image. Propaganda from his enemies and his own combative nature and thin skin hurt his standing during his life and limited his political prospects. When his long and complex relationship with Aaron Burr ultimately led to Hamilton’s death after their infamous duel his enemies would continue to slander his reputation while his widow Eliza would spend the rest of her life defending it and try to make sure his accomplishments weren’t forgotten. What Chernow has done with this sympathetic portrait of a brilliant but flawed man is illustrate how America owes so much to Hamilton’s genius. By detailing Hamilton’s collaborations and battles with the other Founding Fathers it shows that they weren’t saints with some glorious vision of what America should be. They engaged in compromises and accepted contradictions in the interests of getting things done, and they were consumed by the fears of all the ways the country could fail. They were also just as capable of acting in short-sighted, mean spirited, and despicable ways as any politician today, Thomas Jefferson in particular comes across as a hypocritical sneaky jerkface that I would never vote for. After reading this it’s easy to understand how Hamilton the remarkable person inspired Hamilton the remarkable musical. ...more |
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Apr 25, 2016
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Jun 20, 2016
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Apr 25, 2016
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Paperback
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| 081298854X
| 9780812988543
| 081298854X
| 4.22
| 8,922
| 1996
| Sep 29, 2015
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really liked it
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A woman and her male friend were brutally murdered just outside her home. There was practically a trail of blood leading to her ex-husband’s house. Th
A woman and her male friend were brutally murdered just outside her home. There was practically a trail of blood leading to her ex-husband’s house. The ex had a history of domestic violence against her and no alibi. A mountain of physical and circumstantial evidence including DNA, hairs, footprints, and a bloody glove found on his property all point at him as the killer. You didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to solve this one, but I doubt that even an amazing lawyer like Perry Mason or Atticus Fitch could have gotten a conviction considering everything that happened next. I thought the interest I had in the OJ Simpson murder case had been buried in a shallow grave back in the ‘90s along with some grunge CD’s, my flannel shirts, and any lingering belief that the legal system actually worked as advertised. That's why I was surprised to find myself getting so wrapped up in the excellent TV mini-series from FX based on this book that I wanted to read it. While the show was a gripping dramatization that highlighted social issues that we’re still grappling with today this is more of a straightforward look at the case, but it’s still fascinating to get a step-by-step account of what exactly happened. Jeffrey Toobin was a lawyer turned reporter who covered the trial starting with a story leaked to him by Simpson attorney Robert Shapiro that was the first seed of what would become a defense based on the idea that OJ was framed by racist cops. Toobin doesn’t even pretend to entertain the notion that Simpson might have been innocent and instead focuses on the legal strategies and mistakes that happened along with a bit of biographical info about the major players and their personalities. He also highlights what a media circus the entire fiasco became and how that became a factor for everyone in the court room. The book delves deeply into exactly how Simpson’s legal team, led by the brilliant Johnny Cochran, exploited the racial tensions of Los Angeles just a few years after the Rodney King beating and riots. Cochran had been hoping for a hung jury at best and basing much of his strategy on pointing a finger at the detective who found some of the key evidence, Mark Fuhrman*. After tapes of Fuhrman using racial slurs and bragging about abusing minorities as a cop surfaced that proved he’d lied under oath a delighted Cochran realized that he’d gotten the chance for a full acquittal and pressed hard for it. OJ’s defense was helped along by the prosecution which had an almost unerring instinct for shooting themselves in the foot at critical moments. For example, one strong piece of evidence was that the type of gloves used by the killer were a specialty item of which only 200 pairs had ever been sold. Investigation showed records that Nicole had purchased a pair of these in OJ’s size while they were still married, and the prosecution had a strong witness in a sales rep for the company to explain this. Yet rather than simply pointing out how unlikely it would be that Nicole Simpson was murdered by someone else who had bought these rare gloves Christopher Darden let himself get distracted and baited by the defense into having OJ try them on. This led to the famous incident of OJ struggling to put on the gloves and Cochran’s later assertion that, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”** What should have been a solid piece of evidence against OJ instead became a moment that was a complete disaster. Still, Toobin documents the prosecution probably had no chance to convict no matter what they had done once the jury was chosen. From the focus group research done before the trial to the mindset of the of jury during the proceeding to their very brief deliberations the book makes a compelling case that they jury had their minds made up almost from the start, and that OJ’s fame as well as the LAPD’s history of racism both played a large part in that. I don’t think that’s actually unique to the OJ jury. I’ve been reading a lot in recent years that has convinced me that people are hardwired to believe what we want, and this applies to politics, religion, conspiracy theories, and even the scams of con men. Human beings are just crappy about accepting facts that contradict what we think we already know, and we will come up with any absurd reason we can to justify this. That’s a big part of the reason why a judicial system based on believing in the common sense and objectivity of average everyday people is fundamentally flawed. And democracy doesn’t work either. (OK, I’m kidding about democracy. Sort of. Maybe. Maybe not. Ask me again in November 2016.) There were a couple of small issues I had with the book. I listened to the audio version of this which hasn’t been updated in quite some time so the wrap-up at the end was pretty dated. It doesn’t include the deaths of some key players like Cochran or that OJ lost a civil suit to the Brown and Goldman families during which more evidence of his guilt was presented. OJ only paid a fraction of the millions they were awarded and is currently in prison for another crime he committed years later. I’ve also seen that Marcia Clark has disputed some details of Toobin’s account recently, but I’m not sure how much of that is because he consistently places much of the blame for prosecution failures on her for being arrogant overall and sometimes hostile to witnesses when it wasn’t called for. At the end of it all Toobin effectively spells out that African-Americans in LA during the mid-’90s had ample reasons to mistrust the police force. The LAPD having a racist like Mike Fuhrman be a cop at all was the kind of thing which created the environment that allowed a wife-beating narcissist whose favorite hobby was playing golf with his rich white friends at his country club to successfully exploit a very real racial problem to get away with double murder. * Fuhrman had tried to get a stress disability pension in the early '80s and essentially admitted misconduct while claiming it was the stress of the job that caused his behavior. The LAPD thought he was faking to get an early pension and put him back on the street. So either Fuhrman was a guy admitting that he was unstable and unfit to be a police officer, or he was a liar trying to get off the job. Neither one of these would seem like the kind of cop you’d want to keep on the payroll, and yet they did. **Toobin provides a detailed explanation as to why the form fitting gloves which were coated in dried blood wouldn’t easily slide on over the latex gloves Simpson was wearing, and OJ did one of his finest acting jobs ever by pretending to struggle with them. Marcia Clark also pointed out in a recent interview that while claiming innocence OJ didn’t seem bothered at all by trying on gloves coated in his ex-wife’s blood and mugging for the cameras and the jury while doing it. ...more |
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Mar 28, 2016
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Apr 07, 2016
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Mar 28, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0385529988
| 9780385529983
| 0385529988
| 4.07
| 18,981
| Jan 27, 2015
| Jan 27, 2015
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really liked it
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We love murder. Let me clarify that statement. We love murder as entertainment when the victim is some poor innocent blonde woman that our hero detecti We love murder. Let me clarify that statement. We love murder as entertainment when the victim is some poor innocent blonde woman that our hero detectives avenge with a little help from the geeks in the crime lab, and the whole thing is wrapped up in an hour. Or about 45 minutes with commercials if it’s on network television. This book is non-fiction so it certainly doesn’t have the appeal of a tidy TV solution, and it digs into the whole sociology of a community where murder is common and the police as an institution seems more interested in easy drug busts and flashy anti-gang units even as it cuts the overtime of it’s already understaffed homicide units. So that takes a lot of the fun out of murder. One of those homicides was Bryant Tennelle, a young man who got shot for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In a cruel twist, Bryant was the son of a LAPD detective who was one of the rare cops to live where he policed. Part of the book follows the efforts of another relentless detective named John Skaggs to solve the case. Reporter Jill Leovy spent years covering and researching homicides in LA, and she doesn’t just tell us the story of that one murder. The elephant in the room regarding murder in America is that the majority of it is made up of black men killing black men. She tackles the issues head on, and offers reasons and possible solutions to it. What history shows is that in areas where a poor community feels repressed and vulnerable, when major crimes go unpunished while the citizens feel harassed by the force failing to protect them, it breeds murder. In LA the police resources were dedicated mainly to crime prevention, not crime investigation and homicide clearance rates had fallen to abysmal levels. Leovy’s findings show that this has created the worst kind of Catch-22 situation where the emphasis on the wrong kind of policing has the black citizens feeling harassed even as they think the cops don’t care about solving murders so they don’t cooperate. The cops get frustrated by the lack of cooperation and put even less effort into solving black murders. Rinse and repeat. The good news is that Leovy actually thinks the situation could be greatly improved if the cops put more resources into catching killers. She uses Skaggs’ investigation of Tennelle’s death to show how a seemingly random shooting can be solved. Not with any kind of Sherlock Holmes deduction or CSI labs, but by simply showing up, listening, and giving a damn about all the people involved like the victim’s family and witnesses. Per her final chapter the situation has improved in south LA which she credits to better police policies and social programs. Comparisons to David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets are inevitable and fair because Leovy does cover a lot of the same ground as far as following around detectives and showing what actual police work is like. It also hits a lot of the same themes that Simon’s The Wire did about institutions presenting a good face rather than doing meaningful work. This plays on more of the sociological angles than Simon’s works, but it lacks his style and humor so I still think Homicide is a better read. Leovy also puts John Skaggs on a pedestal which gets to be a little tiresome after a while. However, it’s still an important book that takes a hard look at a very real problem. ...more |
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Feb 05, 2016
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Mar 08, 2016
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Feb 05, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0785814949
| 9780785814948
| 0785814949
| 3.64
| 150
| 1998
| Jan 28, 2009
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liked it
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None
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not set
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not set
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Feb 03, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1455588199
| 9781455588190
| 1455588199
| 3.92
| 1,843
| Sep 06, 2016
| Sep 06, 2016
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really liked it
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I received a free ARC of this from NetGalley for review. In this era of Peak TV I subscribe to a couple of streaming options that I could easily spend I received a free ARC of this from NetGalley for review. In this era of Peak TV I subscribe to a couple of streaming options that I could easily spend a month or so watching non-stop and still not get through the shows on my current watch lists. Meanwhile, my DVR is usually glowing red hot from all the recording it’s doing for the shows airing on the network and cable stations. So what I really didn’t need read right now is a book that makes me want to watch more TV, but I'm still glad I read it. Television critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz started sharing a newspaper column 20 years ago just as a revolution was about to occur that would change the TV landscape. Although they both moved on to other jobs they remained friends and had on-going debates about TV topics which has led them to come up with a list of the all-time best 100 TV shows. They cheerfully admit that this is a bit of a fool’s errand in that there’s something inherently flawed about comparing a show like All in the Family to The X-Files. However, they came up with a ranking system they both used to score shows on a variety of factors, and then used it to come up with their top 100 which they then explained in more detail in short essays about each one. They used some basic rules to keep it all somewhat in line: Only American shows that have ended were considered although there are some notable exceptions like The Simpsons and South Park which after decades on the air had enough material to adequately judge. Some shows with uncertain futures, like Louie, were included in case their creators never produce more. No reality TV was considered, and variety, skit, and talk shows were also deemed too hard to compare to scripted dramas and comedies. Longevity was also a factor because a brilliant show that only produced a handful of episodes like Firefly obviously didn’t have the burden of sustaining that level of quality over the course of many seasons so there was handicapping done in the ranking system to account for that. So after applying math and some logical rules to their exercise what did Sepinwall and Seitz come up with? A bunch of shows that’s pretty much what you’d expect if you pay attention to things like awards, reviews, and critic’s Best-Of lists. It turns out what is generally considered the best TV is still the best TV by their standards, and an unforgiving cynic might think this is merely a clickbait interwebs article taken to book form. However, what makes this interesting to me as a TV fan isn’t the rankings they gave or what shows did and didn't make the top 100 cut although that’s the kind of thing it’s fun to argue about over a couple of beers. My favorite part was an online conversation they had in which they debated how to rank the 5 top shows that tied in their ranking system. Through the course of that discussion they question how much a show’s innovation mattered vs. just doing something familiar as well as it’s ever been done, whether they had an inherent bias towards thinking of dramas as ‘better’ than comedies, and how to judge a show filled with peaks and valleys against a show that was consistently great but didn’t provide as many next level moments. It was a fascinating, often funny, conversation between two critics who know their subjects, have the skill and self-awareness to step back and ask themselves just what made these shows so great, and then follow those trains of thoughts to logical conclusions. Good criticism shouldn’t just be about giving a score or a thumbs up/thumbs down. It should make you think about what you like or hate, and why you like or hate it which not only teaches you something about the material but maybe something about yourself in the process. So while I found myself disagreeing with their ultimate conclusion it still gave me a lot of food for thought as well as a desire to go out and watch all of them again. The rest of the essays do a similarly good job of explaining why those shows were considered among the best while pointing out the flaws. They’ve got a real knack for explaining the appeal of a series and describing what made it special. (If anyone ever asks me what’s so great about Deadwood I’ll probably just have them read their description of it.) There’s also some effort made towards explaining what they meant beyond just being TV shows. For example, the article about I Love Lucy doesn’t just pay homage to it as a groundbreaking comedy, but also outlines how Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were true innovators whose impact on television from a creative and business standpoint went far beyond even what they did on screen as Lucy and Ricky. There’s also some bonus features like funny lists about things like the best and worst bosses on television. They also do lists of the best mini-series, TV movies, honorable mentions, and current shows that will probably make the Top 100 list after they complete their runs. The essays are filled with spoilers to the shows in the interests of discussing them fully, but it should be easy to avoid by skipping over any ones you haven’t seen it yet. Fair warning that the bonus lists do contain some spoilers, particularly one about the best character deaths so maybe skip those if you’re worried about such things. Taken all together this is a love letter to television written by two guys who appreciate how lucky they were to be in exactly the right place to help document a golden age. ...more |
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Sep 10, 2016
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Sep 14, 2016
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Feb 01, 2016
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| 0989238105
| 9780989238106
| 0989238105
| 4.44
| 528
| Aug 2013
| Dec 30, 2013
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really liked it
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Star Trek just turned fifty, and since I’m a fan only a few years younger than it I’ve soaked up enough of its history and trivia over my lifetime to
Star Trek just turned fifty, and since I’m a fan only a few years younger than it I’ve soaked up enough of its history and trivia over my lifetime to qualify as a bridge officer on the USS Nerdlinger. Yet this book opened my eyes to all kinds of things about the show including debunking several myths I’ve taken as Trek gospel. It starts off as kind of your standard behind-the-scenes story of how a pilot turned cop turned TV writer/producer named Gene Roddenberry came up with the idea for a sci-fi show, and then it describes the often painful process by which it eventually was brought to life by a dedicated cast and crew. That’s a fascinating story in itself, but by going through the production documents like script drafts, shooting schedules, and memos as well as drawing on personal recollections of those involved Marc Cushman also provides what becomes almost a daily diary of the initial creation and filming of each episode. So we get a big picture view of things like how the television industry worked at the time so that the executives of Desilu Productions had good cause to think that shows like Star Trek and Mission Impossible might bankrupt the studio, and how Lucille Ball had to repeatedly step in to override her own board to keep them from being scrapped. We also drill down to the level of noting exactly who wrote each draft of a script and what changes were made as well as personal stories for all the guest stars and crew as well as the major figures like Roddenberry, Shatner, and Nimoy. What emerges from all of the this is an intriguing picture of the controlled chaos that the production of the show frequently was. It also provides a lot of facts that contradict the general wisdom we usually hear about the original series. The story I always heard was that the show was low-rated at the time, cheaply done, and that the broadcast network NBC frowned on it’s progressive social messages and attitudes. In fact, the show had very respectable ratings in its first season against stiff competition from other networks, it was one of the most expensive made at the time, and NBC was actually encouraging things like diverse casting. So why does nerd lore tell us something else? It was probably a variety of misconceptions and myths that grew up for a variety of reasons. Networks didn’t release ratings back in those days, and in fact might not want the producers of a show to know exactly how popular it was to prevent them from asking for more money. The show often looked cheap and slapped together because the technical demands had them constantly over budget and behind schedule. As for why NBC was often painted as a villain you could probably say that's due to Gene Roddenberry's habit of blaming NBC when he had to make an unpopular decision. In fact, while Roddenberry certainly deserves a huge share of the credit for creating the show his behavior frequently caused issues that probably hurt it and helped lead to its cancellation after three seasons. His style of dealing with freelance writers and insisting on unpaid revisions which he would then rewrite himself rubbed many the wrong way, and he routinely pissed off NBC. Roddenberry would then spin these disagreements as examples of the network pushing back against his social messages when the reasons might be directly due to his more selfish motives. For example, Majel Barrett was cast as the first officer in the original pilot, and the story I’d always heard was that the network didn’t think a woman should have such an important role and made Roddenberry change it in the second version. In reality NBC balked at Majel Barrett because she was Roddenberry’s mistress at the time so it seemed like bad business, and it’s hard to fault them for thinking that. At the same time we learn how the show was hiring people like Gene Coon, a veteran writer/producer who stepped in at a critical time and showed an amazingly quick ability to to write his own scripts and revise the problematic work of others. Dorothy Fontana was an aspiring screenwriter who initially took secretarial jobs to get her foot in the door of the industry which she first used to sell scripts to TV westerns as D.C. Fontana. Eventually she became Gene Roddenberry’s secretary, then a freelance writer for him, and finally took on the position of story editor which made her one of the most important Trek creators. The only problem is that sitting down and reading about all these episodes in a row gets a little repetitive. The production of the show fell into a rhythm that the book captures, and that starts to feel monotonous after a while although there’s always plenty of amusing anecdotes like how they got an actor to be in the rubber suit of the lizard-like Gorn creature by calling the guy in at the last minute without telling him what he’d be playing. So as a straight up reading experience it can get a little tedious after a while although I think any TOS fan would like the initial stories about the show’s creation and find it a great reference when revisiting individual episodes. ...more |
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Feb 04, 2017
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Apr 10, 2021
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Apr 02, 2021
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really liked it
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Sep 10, 2020
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Jul 13, 2020
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it was ok
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Jun 10, 2020
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Jun 10, 2020
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Apr 27, 2020
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Apr 19, 2020
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Dec 02, 2019
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Nov 29, 2019
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really liked it
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Nov 15, 2019
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Nov 11, 2019
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Dec 19, 2019
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Nov 08, 2019
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really liked it
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Oct 22, 2019
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Oct 15, 2019
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Aug 09, 2019
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Aug 06, 2019
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Jul 29, 2019
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Jul 26, 2019
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really liked it
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Apr 15, 2019
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Apr 03, 2019
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really liked it
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Mar 14, 2018
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Jan 31, 2018
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Nov 22, 2017
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Nov 09, 2017
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Jun 04, 2016
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Jun 02, 2016
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really liked it
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Jun 20, 2016
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Apr 25, 2016
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really liked it
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Apr 07, 2016
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Mar 28, 2016
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really liked it
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Mar 08, 2016
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Feb 05, 2016
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| 3.64
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liked it
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not set
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Feb 03, 2016
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| 3.92
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really liked it
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Sep 14, 2016
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Feb 01, 2016
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| 4.44
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really liked it
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Feb 25, 2017
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Jan 29, 2016
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