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THE MURDER OF DR. CHAPMAN

THE LEGENDARY TRIALS OF LUCRETIA CHAPMAN AND HER LOVER

Slightly marred by the author’s tendency to wandering wordiness, but lovers of the genre will certainly forgive her.

A sordid case that spread sensation like wildfire across an 1830s America just beginning to flex its national brand of jurisprudence.

Historical crime annals can wax dry as a crust unless their contemporary chronicler captures the tenor and texture of the times, the prevailing moods and opinions, and delivers them to the reader without breaking stride. True-crime veteran Wolfe (Double Life, 1994, etc.) gets good grades on all counts. Readers will feel every jolt, jostle, and spasm of motion sickness, for example, on the 1831 stagecoach ride from Albany to Syracuse taken by fallen fugitive Lucretia, widow of William Chapman, whose desperation is underscored by the harrowing journey itself. In addition, the author builds suspense for the fatal encounter by fleshing out the backgrounds of the three main characters literally from the cradle: Lucretia, the comely but imposingly statuesque New England teacher; William, the portly recovered stammerer who envisioned a commercial windfall in curing other sufferers and rescued the schoolmarm from spinsterhood in 1818; and the ingratiating Lino, the very prototype of a Latin lover, whose character flaws ran so deep that he couldn’t help running a scam on any provincial Pennsylvanian standing within earshot, if only for the exercise. To this ménage, add marital discord and a Philadelphia pharmacist willing to dispense four ounces of arsenic to someone claiming to plan a venture in taxidermy. (Remember, at some point in history, every “likely story” could have sounded thoroughly plausible.) The author then unravels agonizing death, growing suspicion, primitively gory forensics, detection, flight, capture, local political intrigues, and prosecution, leading to a pair of trials perhaps exceeded in impact on a fledgling nation only by that of Aaron Burr for killing Alexander Hamilton.

Slightly marred by the author’s tendency to wandering wordiness, but lovers of the genre will certainly forgive her.

Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2004

ISBN: 0-06-019623-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003

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TOMBSTONE

THE EARP BROTHERS, DOC HOLLIDAY, AND THE VENDETTA RIDE FROM HELL

Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.

Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.

The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.

Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.

Pub Date: April 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020

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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”

No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

Pub Date: March 2, 2004

ISBN: 0-609-61062-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003

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