A fascinating and dramatic page-turner that will be a new favorite among true-crime fans.
In this depraved story of sex, deception, greed, and murder, a veteran true-crime writer offers the first definitive history of Belle Gunness (circa 1859-1908), the most prolific female serial killer in American history.
In previous books, Schechter (American Literature and Culture/Queens Coll.; Man-Eater: The Life and Legend of an American Cannibal, 2015, etc.) trained his shrewd eye for detail and predilection for horror on familiar serial killers like H.H. Holmes (Depraved, 1994) and Albert Fish (Deranged, 1998). Here, the author focuses his expert attention on Gunness, the notorious “Lady Bluebeard” who butchered at least 28 victims at her “murder farm” in La Porte, Indiana, at the beginning of the 20th century. An imposing, severe Norwegian who weighed more than 200 pounds, Gunness immigrated to America in search of a new life far away from the poverty of her youth. Driven by greed and an insatiable hunger for wealth, she used matrimonial ads in immigrant newspapers to lure suitors to her farm, where she would con them out of their money before poisoning them, brutally butchering their remains, and burying them in her hog pen. Ray Lamphere, a hired farmhand who had an affair with Gunness, was one of the only men to leave the farm alive when he was fired in 1908. Lamphere was charged with arson and quadruple murder when the Gunness home was burned down with its owner and her children inside, but the investigation of the fire revealed the true horror: the mass graveyard of Lady Bluebeard’s victims. Schechter interweaves the stories of Gunness and Lamphere with a suspenseful narrative that explores the motives and psychology of murder, the sensational portrayal of gruesome crime in the media, and the terrifying legacy they leave behind. Featuring previously undiscovered details and rich historical context, this authoritative account firmly establishes Schechter as one of America’s leading crime chroniclers.
A fascinating and dramatic page-turner that will be a new favorite among true-crime fans.Pub Date: April 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4778-0895-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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