Entertaining and edifying essays keep the reader mindful of the thin lines separating illicit temptation from criminal...
Promising debut for a new annual anthology, with 17 selections bearing out the editors’ contention that “crime, being human, runs along a continuum that steadily darkens.”
Edgar nominee Cook (Places in the Dark, 2000, etc.) and Mysterious Press founder Penzler have chosen entries of consistently high quality in a pleasing variety of tones and authorial stances. E. Jean Carroll’s “The Cheerleaders” (originally in Spin) depicts a bizarre string of murder, accident, and suicide that decimated the teenage girls of Dryden, New York; it’s one of several pieces here that capture the havoc crime wreaks upon domestic tranquility. Many essays first appeared in the New Yorker, including Pat Jordan’s “The Outcast,” an interview-based portrait of O.J. Simpson detailing both his cheesy Florida exile and his barely contained malevolence, and Peter Boyer’s “Bad Cops,” which addresses aspects of the LAPD Ramparts scandal. Selections from GQ and Details explore unsettling connections between violence and the culture of sport and hedonistic consumption, whether represented by football player Rae Carruth, who arranged a pregnant woman’s murder (Peter Richmond’s “Flesh and Blood”), or by an impoverished Texas woman who killed her children during a sex-and-drugs bender (Robert Draper’s “A Prayer for Tina Marie”). Other malefactors range from Oklahoma cockfighters and Israeli Ecstasy kingpins to a defrocked DEA agent and a serial killer/con artist. And there’s no shortage of provocatively expansive topics. In “The Chicago Crime Commission,” Robert Kurson portrays the last of the true believers fighting the once-feared “Outfit,” while William Langewiesche’s sobering explication of “The Crash of Egyptair 990” underscores the vast gulf between American and Arabic cultures. Of course, this is also the underlying story of Time editor Nancy Gibbs’s “The Day of the Attack,” which brings a necessary journalistic clarity to the recent horror of September 11, 2001, while focusing on its human toll.
Entertaining and edifying essays keep the reader mindful of the thin lines separating illicit temptation from criminal savagery.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42163-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A bizarre first-person account of a young man’s nearly disastrous obsession with serial killers. As a freshman at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, Moss, who dreamed of a career in law enforcement, conceived the idea of writing to serial killers on death row, hoping to gain their trust and discover what made them tick. His most extensive contact was with John Wayne Gacy, who had raped and murdered 33 teenage boys. He also corresponded with Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez (a.k.a. the Night Stalker), and other killers whom he admired for their nerve. To gain Gacy’s attention—death-row inmates of Gacy’s notoriety are besieged by would-be correspondents—Moss posed as a sexually confused and highly impressionable boy, matching himself to the profile of Gacy’s victims. When this ploy worked, Moss felt that he had psyched out the killer and assumed that he would be able to manipulate and control him. Soon, however, Moss found himself identifying with, even sympathizing with Gacy, who began telephoning him regularly. When Gacy invited him for an expense-paid visit, Moss discovered that the guards behaved more like servants and left him alone and unobserved in the same room with the convicted murderer. Though aging and handcuffed, Gacy was able to break Moss down and turn him into the confused and compliant young man he had been pretending to be, demonstrating for him not only how a predator operates but how a potential victim feels. Fortunately, Moss, who could easily have become Gacy’s last victim, escaped with only his ego bruised. A prologue and afterword by psychologist Kottler comment on both Moss’s behavior and society’s propensity for glorifying violence and turning serial killers into celebrities. An engrossing and gut-wrenching read. (20 b&w photos)
Pub Date: April 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-446-52340-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
Yale computer scientist Gelernter (1939: The Lost World of the Fair, 1995, etc.) offers a peculiar rant only tangentially about his ordeal as a Unabomber target and the resulting irreparable damage to his right hand and eye. Despite his claim that the bomb that almost killed him, and its aftermath, ``forced me to rething everything I knew about American society,'' it would be difficult to identify an opinion in the book that Gelernter doesn't appear to have held undisturbed for decades, except for his discovery that most reporters are amoral swine. The account of his recovery and newfound celebrity status fills out a thin and entirely unoriginal tract on the ``takeover'' of the American ``elite'' by ``intellectuals'' in the 1960s and the consequent moral degradation of American society that he sees, or reads about, all around him. He doesn't bother to explain who these intellectual masterminds really are (aside from Norman Mailer and Betty Friedan) or what the perverse theories are by which they rule, except for an excessive reverence for ``tolerance.'' Gelernter skips to his main complaint: The ``most disastrous consequence'' of this ``Civil Rights Religion'' is feminism. Tossing off generalizations that disintegrate upon examination (``A lesbian activist gets more respect nowadays than a homemaker''), Gelernter argues that many more women now work because female intellectuals are antagonistic to childrearing and have created a climate in which women are ideologically impelled to get out of the home. This screed is padded with a messy assembly of self-satisfied musings on Gelernter's own artistic sensitivity as poet, painter, and lover of music (punctuated by goofy self-deprecatring asides that define his particular style of false modesty) and, unsurprisingly, on a yearning for a relentlessly idealized 1930s America. Full of solipsism, smugness, and petty arrogance—an exercise in self-regard. (First serial to Time)
Pub Date: Sept. 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83912-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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