A chilling book of true crime featuring important social issue concerns.
A writer born in Northern Ireland examines the stories of women who disappeared without a trace in 1990s Ireland.
Between 1993 and 1998, eight women disappeared 80 miles outside Dublin in a “safe and welcoming country where bad things don’t really happen.” Exploring these disappearances, all of which took place during the author’s adolescence in Northern Ireland, McGowan recalls that no one ever discussed these missing person cases. She only stumbled upon them when she was doing research for her own crime fiction almost two decades later. In 2000, when a 24-year-old woman was found murdered near Dublin “in a populated area and in broad daylight,” McGowan felt compelled to investigate crimes that occurred years before. She discovered the women were a heterogenous group with no connection to each other. Yet those she talked to about them almost invariably asked if they were involved in sex work. “Think about what it means, that question—that we expect a certain type of woman to go missing, to be murdered,” she writes.” While police had worked on the cases for three years, the author discovered that in one case, it took them three days to start looking for the missing woman. She also learned that one woman who had barely escaped from a brutal rape and attempted murder in Dublin’s “vanishing triangle” saw her attacker, a husband and father others considered “a decent man,” released from prison five years before the end of his sentence. McGowan surmises that the “savagery and speed” of the ambush suggested a man who knew what he was doing. Yet he was never investigated further for possible connection to the eight disappearances. Readable and thought-provoking, this book reveals that despite efforts at modernization and liberalization, Irish systems of justice and power remain as patriarchal as they are complicit in maintaining a centuries-old culture of silence, suppression, and misogyny.
A chilling book of true crime featuring important social issue concerns.Pub Date: May 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-3529-3
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.
Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Marylanddecision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61254-149-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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