Harold Schechter

Starts promising but takes a sharp turn to the dull as it moves from showing to telling. The first half of the book is a dramatization of Ed Gein's childhood and early adulthood taking us to just months before he would begin his grave robberies and murders. Then suddenly the narrative shifts to the day of his arrest and mostly becomes a sea of captions with a few flashbacks to his crimes tucked in between the endless talking heads of neighbors, authorities, and doctors.

It's like switching show more from a Lifetime movie to a History Channel documentary without warning. show less

In the 1950's there was a young serial killer named Charles Starkweather. In the late 1960's there was Charles Manson. Wedged in between was Charles Schmid, an Elvis wanna-be who killed teenage girls and buried them out in the Tucson desert. His notoriety at the time of his arrest earned him the nickname "The Pied Piper of Tucson" as his sociopathic charm made him popular with girls despite the fact that he wore a full face of heavy make-up.
This was the most interesting of the Bloodlands show more Collection of true crime stories, to me. Maybe because Tucson isn't that far from me, or just the fact that it was recent enough that there were pictures of the weird looking but sort of handsome killer, including one of him in women's clothing and wig from when he escaped from prison and was immediately recognized by a railroad worker, who just happened to have gone to high school with him.
I should mention that each Kindle edition of these stories has some pretty cool graphics. When you open this one, the shovel raises and then stabs into the dirt, where a skeletal hand appears, then there's a flashing montage of actual newspaper and magazine headlines and photos of the victims. Really well done, and it's another story I'd never heard of. show less

Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer by Harold Schechter is a wonderful example of how true crime books can accomplish so much more than just recount a crime.

Many true crime readers are interested primarily in the crime, in the bizarre pleasure we get from reading the details of a horrific incident. Such a reader will be pleased with this account as we are walked through the background and the incident. Schechter does a phenomenal job of presenting the show more killer, Kehoe, in a way that gives us a glimpse of both the public facade and the internal, private monster. Again, the best of the genre do this to some extent and this is one of the best.

Perhaps where Schechter excels and sets himself apart is in his ability to connect the crime to aspects of society, both contemporaneous to the crime and into present day. He begins in his introduction painting the larger societal and historical picture into which he then fills in the details of this particular crime.

I highly recommend this to true crime readers as well as readers who enjoy thinking about how and why so many events disappear from our collective memories while others, often no more heinous, leave a long term mark. The reader gets the excitement expected with true crime along with some analysis about what makes such a crime more or less memorable.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

An unmanned oyster sloop drifted up to the New York Harbor in March of 1860 and was boarded in an effort to find the crew. What witnesses found instead was a ship drenched in fresh blood and handfuls of human hair, along with evidence that someone had gotten their hand chopped off. Due to the determination of the local police, the mystery of who had committed this atrocity was quickly solved: it was the new first mate, Albert Hicks, who killed the captain and the other crew members, two show more young brothers, with an axe just twenty-four hours after setting sail. This true crime story includes Hicks' trial and the involvement of P.T. Barnum. Hicks was so notorious that pleasure boats advertised for customers to watch the hanging from the bay (refreshments included). show less