A true-crime grab bag.
Lauren reflects on her relationship with a serial killer.
Samuel Little confessed to killing 93 women between 1970 and 2005. The FBI has confirmed his involvement in at least 60 of these murders, making Little the most prolific known serial killer in U.S. history. Before Little died in a Los Angeles prison in 2020, Lauren, the author of the memoirs Everything You Ever Wanted and Some Girls, exchanged letters with him and, ultimately, conducted hundreds of hours of face-to-face interviews over the course of a few years. This book is an amalgam of scenes from the author’s relationship with Little, records of her interactions with law enforcement, vignettes from her travels to understand the murderer and his victims, a memoir of this time in her life, and imagined narratives about the women Little killed. Attempting to give Little’s victims a voice through fiction makes emotional sense, and it might make artistic sense in a different kind of narrative. However, this is a nonfiction book, and this choice casts a cloud of confusion over the entire text. Re-creating important moments and filling the gaps between the known and the unknown with educated guesses is an important skill for nonfiction writers, but Lauren doesn’t make it easy for readers to understand when she’s quoting someone directly or when she’s making a guess at what they might have said. It’s not always clear when she’s relating something she knows because she was there or because she has solid documentary evidence—or, instead, cobbling together a scene from bits and pieces of information she’s gathered. The lack of any obvious chronological throughline also makes this book difficult to comprehend and appreciate. Perhaps the material worked better in Confronting a Serial Killer, a docuseries Lauren hosted on the Starz network. The book includes an introduction by Michael Connelly.
A true-crime grab bag.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781728267753
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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