A relevant true-crime cautionary tale as well as an urgent plea for mental health awareness.
An unsettling chronicle of the “Slenderman” stabbing and its subsequent courtroom debacle.
In 2014, two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, planned the murder of their friend. They believed her death would appease Slenderman, a fictional character popularized by the website Creepypasta, an aggregator of user-submitted ghost stories. On May 31, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser lured Payton Leutner into the woods and stabbed her 19 times. The girls left her for dead, although miraculously, Leutner survived. Quickly apprehended, Weier and Geyser entered the inconceivably slow stream of Wisconsin’s criminal justice system. Hale breathlessly recounts this unspeakable tragedy but holds her focus on the courtroom and society’s failures in treating the mentally ill. Her message is resonant: We must do better for those in need. However, Leutner’s trauma often feels sidelined while Hale tries to promote awareness and dismantle the stigmas surrounding mental illness. Much of the book is Geyser’s story. She was dealing with schizophrenia with little understanding that her illness was something treatable. “They said I was trying to get attention,” she explained years after the incident. Her parents were in denial, and her “teachers had neither the time nor the training” to be supportive. Complicating things further, Wisconsin law allows children to be tried as adults in certain circumstances, a legal gray area that stuck Weier and Geyser in a dangerous three-year limbo between jail and a mental health institute before their judgment. The power of online media remains chillingly present throughout the narrative. During a “livestream of the trial on Facebook,” Hale writes, “internet commenters were offering their opinion of [Geyser’s] character,” some even calling her an “evil creature” that should be killed. Beyond the horrific incident at its center, the book expands into a searing criticism of how society treats (and mistreats) the mentally ill.
A relevant true-crime cautionary tale as well as an urgent plea for mental health awareness.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5980-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Informative but largely unsurprising.
Out of the White House, Trump rages.
McGraw, a national political correspondent at Politico, makes her book debut with a close look at Trump’s life as ex-president, much of the time spent at Mar-a-Lago, his “decadent, sprawling, gilded mansion on the sea.” Trump bought the estate in 1985, converting it 10 years later into a posh club and resort, where “membership costs hundreds of thousands of dollars up front, plus annual fees of $14,000.” Drawing on interviews with politicians and aides, source notes from her reporting, and published articles, McGraw reveals Trump denying his presidential loss and plotting ways to burnish his political clout. He constantly whipped up conspiracy theories. Frustrated after being banned from Twitter, he founded Trump Media LLC to give him an internet presence in Truth Social, and he encouraged Republicans to grovel for his backing in upcoming races. “Believing—or at least peddling—Trump’s falsehoods about the election,” McGraw writes, was “a litmus test for a Trump endorsement.” Republicans who had voted for his impeachment were targeted for defeat. The much-publicized FBI raid of his premises in the summer of 2022 proved a fundraising boon. “More than ever,” writes the author, “he would become his own rallying cry. I am suffering for you would become his gospel.” McGraw chronicles Trump’s fury over books warning against the perils of another Trump presidency, as he kept close tabs on who was—and wasn’t—defending him. He dubbed the Jan. 6 committee the “Unselect Committee of political Hacks and Thugs.” He refused to take the blame for Republicans’ poor showing in the midterms, “the worst performance by an out of power party in decades.” McGraw ends with his victory in the Iowa caucuses, auguring the dismaying prospect of another Trump presidency, fueled by his desire for apocalyptic revenge.
Informative but largely unsurprising.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780593729632
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Readers would do well to heed the dark warning that this book conveys.
The nameless resister inside the White House speaks.
“The character of one man has widened the chasms of American political division,” writes Anonymous. Indeed. The Trump years will not be remembered well—not by voters, not by history since the man in charge “couldn’t focus on governing, and he was prone to abuses of power, from ill-conceived schemes to punish his political rivals to a propensity for undermining vital American institutions.” Given all that, writes the author, and given Trump’s bizarre behavior and well-known grudges—e.g., he ordered that federal flags be raised to full staff only a day after John McCain died, an act that insiders warned him would be construed as petty—it was only patriotic to try to save the country from the man even as the resistance movement within the West Wing simultaneously tried to save Trump’s presidency. However, that they tried did not mean they succeeded: The warning of the title consists in large part of an extended observation that Trump has removed the very people most capable of guiding him to correct action, and the “reasonable professionals” are becoming ever fewer in the absence of John Kelly and others. So unwilling are those professionals to taint their reputations by serving Trump, in fact, that many critical government posts are filled by “acting” secretaries, directors, and so forth. And those insiders abetting Trump are shrinking in number even as Trump stumbles from point to point, declaring victory over the Islamic State group (“People are going to fucking die because of this,” said one top aide) and denouncing the legitimacy of the process that is now grinding toward impeachment. However, writes the author, removal from office is not the answer, not least because Trump may not leave without trying to stir up a civil war. Voting him out is the only solution, writes Anonymous; meanwhile, we’re stuck with a president whose acts, by the resisters’ reckoning, are equal parts stupid, illegal, or impossible to enact.
Readers would do well to heed the dark warning that this book conveys.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1846-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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