Despite a few minor flaws, readers will remain hooked on this compelling story and will eagerly await Dawson’s next book.
Intertwining stories of two infamous killers in postwar London.
In her first book, documentary producer Dawson (Journalism/Univ. of Texas) provides more of an examination of the London smog of 1952 than the murderous actions of serial killer John Reginald Christie (1899-1953). Because the smog was a more prolific killer than Christie, that story unquestionably warrants the author’s attention. Over five days, London was overcome by a “fog”—later rebranded as smog—so thick that visibility was almost nonexistent, and the air filled with toxic levels of multiple pollutants. More than 4,000 people died in the weeks immediately following the smog, and another 7,000-8,000 deaths were attributed to the poisonous air over the subsequent few months. In the same winter, Christie murdered four women, including his wife, bringing his total known victims to six. Dawson deftly weaves the tales together in an engrossing narrative that reads like a thriller. Christie’s story benefits from being told alongside that of the smog, creating a more sinister, darkly romantic atmosphere than a traditional true-crime book. The main weaknesses in Dawson’s debut concern the endings of the two primary narrative threads. In the case of the smog, the author effectively shows how the government’s too-little, too-late solutions to keep the deadly event from repeating itself were completely unsatisfactory, but she doesn’t go deep enough into how woefully inadequate they proved to be. Regarding Christie, in an anticlimactic conclusion, he confessed and was hanged seemingly because he decided he didn’t feel like hiding the bodies anymore. Dawson could hardly have embellished Christie’s story, but as Christmas 1953 approached, doctors were concerned about the solutions offered by the British government, and some follow-up there would have been welcome.
Despite a few minor flaws, readers will remain hooked on this compelling story and will eagerly await Dawson’s next book.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-50686-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
A thoughtful and detailed book to be savored—but not on an empty stomach.
The history of British food, beginning with a tough grain that was all the rage among Neolithic farmers.
That was einkorn, in 4000 BCE. From there, Colquhoun (The Busiest Man in England: A Life of Joseph Paxton, Gardener, Architect & Victorian Visionary, 2006, etc.) moves through Roman feasts calling for ample servings of flamingo, sumptuous Georgian meals relying heavily on melted butter, the class-inflected foodie mania of the mid-1980s and the increasingly processed, commercialized foodstuffs we rely on today. Refreshingly free of jokes about British cooking, her text uses cookery through the ages to explain everything from the British Isles’ waves of invaders and immigrants to class conflict and consciousness, patriotism and terror during World War II rationing. The prose is occasionally stiff and often overly formal, but it thoroughly recounts the fascinating history of an empire. And Colquhoun can reach passionate heights, as in this passage about Victorian celebrity cook Eliza Acton, who “turned away from melted butter to its French equivalent—rich, unguent mayonnaise made by working drops of oil carefully into whisked egg yolks to form a smooth custard, coloured green with parsley juice or flavoured with a pea-sized piece of bruised garlic or a drop of tarragon vinegar.” As it seems most modern books about food must, this one laments meals gone by. “We buy green beans from Kenya and asparagus from Peru without considering its absurdity,” notes the author, who wonders whether this generation will be the last to know fresh fruits picked straight from the vine or bread collected that day from the baker. In discussing Britons’ tormented relationship with eating, Colquhoun points out that “we spend more on the slimming industry than we do on aid for the starving.” They’re not alone: Americans fork out an estimated $30 to $40 billion annually on weight-loss programs and products.
A thoughtful and detailed book to be savored—but not on an empty stomach.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59691-410-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A contemporary window on a remarkable friendship and a divisive decade, which should give considerable pause to those who...
An intriguing and illuminating correspondence between two of America's earliest cold warriors.
In 1948, Whittaker Chambers (himself a former Communist agent then employed as a senior editor at Time magazine) exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. At no small cost, he made his accusation stick, and the liberal poster boy eventually served five years in a federal penitentiary on perjury charges. In the meantime, Manhattan-based de Toledano (then a Newsweek reporter) became a trusted friend of the wary Chambers, who had retreated to a working farm he owned in Maryland. The two soon began writing each other with some regularity, and their letters offer the hair-down commentary of insiders on an eventful era during which Hiss was twice in the dock; de Toledano published Seeds of Treason, a conservative tome; Chambers had an even more successful bestseller (his memoir Witness); the Korean conflict raged; and the political fortunes of Richard Nixon waxed, then waned. Deeply concerned about the Red Menace, the perceived perfidy of the left, and the future of conservatism, the pen pals could be gossipy, even snide, in their assessments of allies, intellectual or otherwise—William Buckley, Bennett Cerf, Dwight Eisenhower, Arthur Koestler, Henry Luce, Joseph McCarthy et al. Nor did they shy from sharing workaday worries involving appropriate outlets for the articles they were writing, the inadequate terms of book contracts, and the well-being of their children. In like vein, de Toledano (who turned 81 in August) and Chambers were not above strutting their intellectual stuff. The correspondence tails off in 1957, when Newsweek assigned de Toledano to its Washington bureau (within easy reach of exurban Maryland) and ends altogether less than one year before Chambers's death in mid-1961.
A contemporary window on a remarkable friendship and a divisive decade, which should give considerable pause to those who recall the 1950s as some sort of golden age without strife.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-89526-425-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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