Download or read book Savage Appetites written by Rachel Monroe and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “necessary and brilliant” (NPR) exploration of our cultural fascination with true crime told through four “enthralling” (The New York Times Book Review) narratives of obsession. In Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe links four criminal roles—Detective, Victim, Defender, and Killer—to four true stories about women driven by obsession. From a frustrated and brilliant heiress crafting crime-scene dollhouses to a young woman who became part of a Manson victim’s family, from a landscape architect in love with a convicted murderer to a Columbine fangirl who planned her own mass shooting, these women are alternately mesmerizing, horrifying, and sympathetic. A revealing study of women’s complicated relationship with true crime and the fear and desire it can inspire, together these stories provide a window into why many women are drawn to crime narratives—even as they also recoil from them. Monroe uses these four cases to trace the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving role of victims, the Satanic Panic, the rise of online detectives, and the long shadow of the Columbine shooting. Combining personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the 20th and 21st centuries, Savage Appetites is a “corrective to the genre it interrogates” (The New Statesman), scrupulously exploring empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of crime.
Download or read book Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers written by Sady Doyle and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year This “witty, engaging analysis” of female monsters in pop culture offers “provocative and incisive” commentary on society’s fear of female rage and power (Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her) Women have always been seen as monsters. Men from Aristotle to Freud have insisted that women are freakish creatures, capable of immense destruction. Maybe they are. And maybe that’s a good thing. Sady Doyle, hailed as “smart, funny and fearless” by the Boston Globe, takes readers on a tour of the female dark side, from the biblical Lilith to Dracula’s Lucy Westenra, from the T-Rex in Jurassic Park to the teen witches of The Craft. She illuminates the women who have shaped our nightmares: Serial killer Ed Gein’s “domineering” mother Augusta; exorcism casualty Anneliese Michel, who starved herself to death to quell her demons; author Mary Shelley, who dreamed her dead child back to life. These monsters embody patriarchal fear of women, and illustrate the violence with which men enforce traditionally feminine roles. They also speak to the primal threat of a woman who takes back her power. In a dark and dangerous world, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers asks women to look to monsters for the ferocity we all need to survive. “Some people take a scalpel to the heart of media culture; Sady Doyle brings a bone saw, a melon baller, and a machete.” —Andi Zeisler, author of We Were Feminists Once
Download or read book Insatiable Appetites written by Kelly L. Watson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this comparative history of cross-cultural encounters in the early North Atlantic world, Kelly L. Watson argues that the persistent rumours of cannibalism surrounding Native Americans served a specific and practical purpose for European settlers. As they forged new identities and found ways to not only subdue but also co-exist with native peoples, the cannibal narrative helped to establish hierarchical categories of European superiority and Native inferiority upon which imperial power in the Americas was predicated."--Cover.
Download or read book The Third Rainbow Girl written by Emma Copley Eisenberg and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *** A NEW YORK TIMES "100 Notable Books of 2020" *** A stunning, complex narrative about the fractured legacy of a decades-old double murder in rural West Virginia—and the writer determined to put the pieces back together. In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived. For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted for the “Rainbow Murders” though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward. In 1993, a local farmer was convicted, only to be released when a known serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility. As time passed, the truth seemed to slip away, and the investigation itself inflicted its own traumas—-turning neighbor against neighbor and confirming the fears of violence outsiders have done to this region for centuries. In The Third Rainbow Girl, Emma Copley Eisenberg uses the Rainbow Murders case as a starting point for a thought-provoking tale of an Appalachian community bound by the false stories that have been told about. Weaving in experiences from her own years spent living in Pocahontas County, she follows the threads of this crime through the complex history of Appalachia, revealing how this mysterious murder has loomed over all those affected for generations, shaping their fears, fates, and desires. Beautifully written and brutally honest, The Third Rainbow Girl presents a searing and wide-ranging portrait of America—divided by gender and class, and haunted by its own violence.
Download or read book The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death written by Corinne May Botz and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2004-09-28 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death offers readers an extraordinary glimpse into the mind of a master criminal investigator. Frances Glessner Lee, a wealthy grandmother, founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936 and was later appointed captain in the New Hampshire police. In the 1940s and 1950s she built dollhouse crime scenes based on real cases in order to train detectives to assess visual evidence. Still used in forensic training today, the eighteen Nutshell dioramas, on a scale of 1:12, display an astounding level of detail: pencils write, window shades move, whistles blow, and clues to the crimes are revealed to those who study the scenes carefully. Corinne May Botz's lush color photographs lure viewers into every crevice of Frances Lee's models and breathe life into these deadly miniatures, which present the dark side of domestic life, unveiling tales of prostitution, alcoholism, and adultery. The accompanying line drawings, specially prepared for this volume, highlight the noteworthy forensic evidence in each case. Botz's introductory essay, which draws on archival research and interviews with Lee's family and police colleagues, presents a captivating portrait of Lee.
Download or read book Murder Book written by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell and published by Andrews Mcmeel+ORM. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is it so much fun to read about death and dismemberment? In Murder Book, lifelong true-crime obsessive and New Yorker cartoonist Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell tries to puzzle out the answer. An unconventional graphic exploration of a lifetime of Ann Rule super-fandom, amateur armchair sleuthing, and a deep dive into the high-profile murders that have fascinated the author for decades, this is a funny, thoughtful, and highly personal blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and true crime with a focus on the often-overlooked victims of notorious killers.
Download or read book Victim F written by Denise Huskins and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shocking true story of a bizarre kidnapping and the victims' re-victimization by the justice system. In March 2015, Denise Huskins and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn awoke from a sound sleep into a nightmare. Armed men bound and drugged them, then abducted Denise. Warned not to call the police or Denise would be killed. Aaron agonized about what to do. Finally he put his trust in law enforcement and dialed 911. But instead of searching for Denise, the police accused Aaron of her murder. His story, they told him, was just unbelievable. When Denise was released alive, the police turned their fire on her, dubbing her the “real-life ‘Gone Girl’” who had faked her own kidnapping. In Victim F, Aaron and Denise recount the horrific ordeal that almost cost them everything. Like too many victims of sexual violence, they were dismissed, disbelieved, and dragged through the mud. With no one to rely on except each other, they took on the victim blaming, harassment, misogyny, and abuse of power running rife in the criminal justice system. Their story is, in the end, a love story, but one that sheds necessary light on sexual assault and the abuse by law enforcement that all too frequently compounds crime victims’ suffering.
Download or read book Scandinavian Noir written by Wendy Lesser and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Even those unmoved by its subject will thrill to [Scandinavian Noir], a beautifully crafted inquiry into fiction, reality, crime and place . . . Perhaps when it comes to fiction and reality, what we need most are critics like Lesser, who can dissect the former with the tools of the latter." --Kate Tuttle, The New York Times Book Review An in-depth and personal exploration of Scandinavian crime fiction as a way into Scandinavian culture at large For nearly four decades, Wendy Lesser's primary source of information about three Scandinavian countries—Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—was mystery and crime novels, and the murders committed and solved in their pages. Having never visited the region, Lesser constructed a fictional Scandinavia of her own making, something between a map, a portrait, and a cultural history of a place that both exists and does not exist. Lesser’s Scandinavia is disproportionately populated with police officers, but also with the stuff of everyday life, the likes of which are relayed in great detail in the novels she read: a fully realized world complete with its own traditions, customs, and, of course, people. Over the course of many years, Lesser’s fictional Scandinavia grew more and more solidly visible to her, yet she never had a strong desire to visit the real countries that corresponded to the made-up ones. Until, she writes, “between one day and the next, that no longer seemed sufficient.” It was time to travel to Scandinavia. With vivid storytelling and an astonishing command of the literature, Wendy Lesser’s Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery illuminates the vast, peculiar world of Scandinavian noir—first as it appears on the page, then as it grows in her mind, and finally, in the summer of 2018, as it exists in reality. Guided by sharp criticism, evocative travel writing, and a whimsical need to discover “the difference between existence and imagination, reality and dream,” Scandinavian Noir is a thrilling and inventive literary adventure from a masterful writer and critic.
Download or read book Savage Beauty written by Nancy Milford and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2002-09-10 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty years after the smashing success of Zelda, Nancy Milford returns with a stunning second act. Savage Beauty is the portrait of a passionate, fearless woman who obsessed American ever as she tormented herself. ONE OF ESQUIRE’S 50 BEST BIOGRAPHIES OF ALL TIME If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the hero of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as flamboyant in her love affairs as she was in her art, was its heroine. The first woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize, Millay was dazzling in the performance of herself. Her voice was likened to an instrument of seduction and her impact on crowds, and on men, was legendary. Yet beneath her studied act, all was not well. Milford calls her book "a family romance"—for the love between the three Millay sisters and their mother was so deep as to be dangerous. As a family, they were like real-life Little Women, with a touch of Mommie Dearest. Nancy Milford was given exclusive access to Millay's papers, and what she found was an extraordinary treasure. Boxes and boxes of letter flew back and forth among the three sisters and their mother—and Millay kept the most intimate diary, one whose ruthless honesty brings to mind Sylvia Plath. Written with passion and flair, Savage Beauty is an iconic portrait of a woman's life.
Download or read book Stay Sexy Don t Get Murdered written by Karen Kilgariff and published by Forge Books. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant #1 New York Times and USA Today best seller by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, the voices behind the hit podcast My Favorite Murder! Sharing never-before-heard stories ranging from their struggles with depression, eating disorders, and addiction, Karen and Georgia irreverently recount their biggest mistakes and deepest fears, reflecting on the formative life events that shaped them into two of the most followed voices in the nation. In Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, Karen and Georgia focus on the importance of self-advocating and valuing personal safety over being ‘nice’ or ‘helpful.’ They delve into their own pasts, true crime stories, and beyond to discuss meaningful cultural and societal issues with fierce empathy and unapologetic frankness. “In many respects, Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered distills the My Favorite Murder podcast into its most essential elements: Georgia and Karen. They lay themselves bare on the page, in all of their neuroses, triumphs, failures, and struggles. From eating disorders to substance abuse and kleptomania to the wonders of therapy, Kilgariff and Hardstark recount their lives with honesty, humor, and compassion, offering their best unqualified life-advice along the way.” —Entertainment Weekly “Like the podcast, the book offers funny, feminist advice for survival—both in the sense of not getting killed and just, like, getting a job and working through your personal shit so you can pay your bills and have friends.” —Rolling Stone At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Blueberries written by Ellena Savage and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stimulating combination of memoir, essay, poetry, confession and critique, Blueberries is a powerful and revealing collection from a rising star in Australian creative non-fiction.
Download or read book The Body Politic written by Brian Platzer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the bestselling tradition of The Interestings and A Little Life, this “cleverly constructed and emotionally compelling” (Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation) novel follows four longtime friends as they navigate love, commitment, and forgiveness while the world around them changes beyond recognition—from the author of the “savvy, heartfelt, and utterly engaging” (Alice McDermott) Bed-Stuy Is Burning. New York City is still regaining its balance in the years following September 11, when four twenty-somethings—Tess, Tazio, David, and Angelica—meet in a bar, each yearning for something: connection, recognition, a place in the world, a cause to believe in. Nearly fifteen years later, as their city recalibrates in the wake of the 2016 election, their bond has endured—but almost everything else has changed. As freshmen at Cooper Union, Tess and Tazio were the ambitious, talented future of the art world—but by thirty-six, Tess is married to David, the mother of two young boys, and working as an understudy on Broadway. Kind and steady, David is everything Tess lacked in her own childhood—but a recent freak accident has left him with befuddling symptoms, and she’s still adjusting to her new role as caretaker. Meanwhile, Tazio—who once had a knack for earning the kind of attention that Cooper Union students long for—has left the art world for a career in creative branding and politics. But in December 2016, fresh off the astonishing loss of his candidate, Tazio is adrift, and not even his gorgeous and accomplished fiancée, Angelica, seems able to get through to him. With tensions rising on the national stage, the four friends are forced to face the reality of their shared histories, especially a long-ago betrayal that has shaped every aspect of their friendship. Elegant and perceptive, “The Body Politic is a book about many things—what it means to be unwell, what it means to heal, how deep and strange friendships can be, and how hidden things never stay hidden for long” (Rachel Monroe, author of Savage Appetites).
Download or read book Eat Like the Animals written by David Raubenheimer and published by Harvest. This book was released on 2020 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our evolutionary ancestors once possessed the ability to intuit what food their bodies needed, in what proportions, and ate the right things in the proper amounts--effortlessly balanced. When and why did we lose this ability, and how can we get it back? David Raubenheimer and Stephen Simpson answer these questions in a compelling narrative, based upon five "eureka" moments they experienced in the course of their groundbreaking research. The book shares their colorful scientific journey--from the foothills of Cape Town, to the deserts of Australia--culminating in a unifying theory of nutrition that has profound implications for our current epidemic of metabolic diseases and obesity. The authors ultimately offer useful prescriptions to understand the unwanted side effects of fad diets, gain control over one's food environment, and see that delicious and healthy are integral parts of proper eating.
Download or read book Murder in the Bayou written by Ethan Brown and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller & the Basis for the Hit Showtime Docuseries Murder in the Bayou is a New York Times bestselling chronicle of a high-stakes investigation into the murders of eight women in a troubled Southern parish that is “part murder case, part corruption exposé, and part Louisiana noir” (New York magazine). Between 2005 and 2009, the bodies of eight women were discovered in Jennings, Louisiana, a bayou town of 10,000 in the Jefferson Davis parish. The women came to be known as the Jeff Davis 8, and local law enforcement officials were quick to pursue a serial killer theory, stirring a wave of panic across Jennings’ class-divided neighborhoods. The Jeff Davis 8 had been among society’s most vulnerable—impoverished, abused, and mired with mental illness. They engaged in sex work as a means of survival. And their underworld activity frequently occurred at a decrepit motel called the Boudreaux Inn. As the cases went unsolved, the community began to look inward. Rumors of police corruption and evidence tampering, of collusion between street and shield, cast the serial killer theory into doubt. But what was really going on in the humid rooms of the Boudreaux Inn? Why were crimes going unsolved and police officers being indicted? What had the eight women known? And could anything be done do stop the bloodshed? Mixing muckraking research and immersive journalism over the course of a five-year investigation, Ethan Brown reviewed thousands of pages of previously unseen homicide files to posit what happened during each woman’s final hours delivering a true crime tale that is “mesmerizing” (Rolling Stone) and “explosive” (Huffington Post). “Brown is a man on a mission...he gives the victims more respectful attention than they probably got in real life” (The New York Times). “A must-read for true-crime fans” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), with a new afterword, Murder in the Bayou is the story of an American town buckling under the dark forces of poverty, race, and class division—and a lightning rod for justice for the daughters it lost.
Download or read book Slenderman written by Kathleen Hale and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full account of the Slenderman stabbing, a true crime narrative of mental illness, the American judicial system, the trials of adolescence, and the power of the internet On May 31, 2014, in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, Wisconsin, two twelve-year-old girls attempted to stab their classmate to death. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier’s violence was extreme, but what seemed even more frightening was that they committed their crime under the influence of a figure born by the internet: the so-called “Slenderman.” Yet the even more urgent aspect of the story, that the children involved suffered from undiagnosed mental illnesses, often went overlooked in coverage of the case. Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls tells that full story for the first time in deeply researched detail, using court transcripts, police reports, individual reporting, and exclusive interviews. Morgan and Anissa were bound together by their shared love of geeky television shows and animals, and their discovery of the user-uploaded scary stories on the Creepypasta website could have been nothing more than a brief phase. But Morgan was suffering from early-onset childhood schizophrenia. She believed that she had seen Slenderman long before discovering him online, and the only way to stop him from killing her family was to bring him a sacrifice: Morgan’s best friend Payton “Bella” Leutner, whom Morgan and Anissa planned to stab to death on the night of Morgan’s twelfth birthday party. Bella survived the attack, but was deeply traumatized, while Morgan and Anissa were immediately sent to jail, and the severity of their crime meant that they would be prosecuted as adults. There, as Morgan continued to suffer from worsening mental illness after being denied antipsychotics, her life became more and more surreal. Slenderman is both a page-turning true crime story and a search for justice.
Download or read book Yellow Bird written by Sierra Crane Murdoch and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The gripping true story of a murder on an Indian reservation, and the unforgettable Arikara woman who becomes obsessed with solving it—an urgent work of literary journalism. “I don’t know a more complicated, original protagonist in literature than Lissa Yellow Bird, or a more dogged reporter in American journalism than Sierra Crane Murdoch.”—William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days In development as a Paramount+ original series WINNER OF THE OREGON BOOK AWARD • NOMINATED FOR THE EDGAR® AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Publishers Weekly When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. In her absence, the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, her tribal government swayed by corporate interests, and her community burdened by a surge in violence and addiction. Three years later, when Lissa learned that a young white oil worker, Kristopher “KC” Clarke, had disappeared from his reservation worksite, she became particularly concerned. No one knew where Clarke had gone, and few people were actively looking for him. Yellow Bird traces Lissa’s steps as she obsessively hunts for clues to Clarke’s disappearance. She navigates two worlds—that of her own tribe, changed by its newfound wealth, and that of the non-Native oilmen, down on their luck, who have come to find work on the heels of the economic recession. Her pursuit of Clarke is also a pursuit of redemption, as Lissa atones for her own crimes and reckons with generations of trauma. Yellow Bird is an exquisitely written, masterfully reported story about a search for justice and a remarkable portrait of a complex woman who is smart, funny, eloquent, compassionate, and—when it serves her cause—manipulative. Drawing on eight years of immersive investigation, Sierra Crane Murdoch has produced a profound examination of the legacy of systematic violence inflicted on a tribal nation and a tale of extraordinary healing.
Download or read book The Kill Jar written by J. Reuben Appelman and published by Gallery Books. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now the subject of the Discovery+ series Children of the Snow, a cold case murder investigation is cracked open by “a powerful, confident voice in the new true crime memoir genre” (James Renner, author of True Crime Addict). Four children were abducted and murdered outside of Detroit during the winters of 1976 and 1977, their bodies eventually dumped in snow banks around the city. J. Reuben Appelman was only six years old when the murders began and even evaded an abduction attempt during that same period, fueling a lifelong obsession with what became known as the Oakland County Child Killings. Autopsies showed that the victims had been fed while in captivity, reportedly held with care. And yet, with equal care, their bodies had allegedly been groomed post-mortem, scrubbed-free of evidence that might link to a killer. There were few credible leads, and equally few credible suspects. That’s what the cops had passed down to the press, and that’s what the city of Detroit, and Appelman, had come to believe. When the abductions mysteriously stopped, a task force operating on one of the largest manhunt budgets in history shut down without an arrest. Although no more murders occurred, Detroit remained haunted. Eerily overlaid upon the author’s own decades-old history with violence, The Kill Jar tells the gripping story of Appelman’s ten-year investigation into buried leads, apparent police cover-ups, con men, child pornography rings, and high-level corruption saturating Detroit’s most notorious serial killer case. “Always deft, often sublime, Appelman uses his investigation to draw us into his personal journey through darkness, to light and life” (Chip Johannessen, producer of Dexter).
