Reading on a Rainy Day

I happen to have a huge review backlog at the moment, which I am not surprised by considering how sporadic my reading and blogging has been, but my articulation quotient has kind of dried up on some of these books as well - so rather than compose huge articles of nothing, I'll just summarize my thoughts on these books. My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf: Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial killer who murdered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991 and was also guilty of rape, dismemberment, necrophilia, and cannnibalism. My Friend Dahmer is however not a narration of his crimes, but rather a portrayal of the killer from the viewpoint of the author, who used to be his classmate. The husband and I read this book together and in the end, we both felt the same way. It was good but nothing fabulous or intriguing. Dahmer's portrayal was quite interesting. He grew up in a troubled home - his parents divorced, his mother moved out taking his younger brother with her. He was shy and an ...

Early last month, there was a new graphic nonfiction book getting a lot of buzz. It's very rare that I see non-comic graphic books getting some much needed hype, so I was quite thrilled to see Green River Killer featured. But I wasn't very sure about the subject itself. I prefer reading non-graphic nonfiction about true crime, I wasn't sure how the graphic medium was going to handle that. How sensitive would it be? Words in reference to psychopaths can make me queasy, but pictures, even more so. Sometimes, it helps to be judgmental when you read - seeing the picture of a tragedy breaks open some vulnerable part in you, and can affect your perception of an incident. With pictures, there's usually only one side that's presented. Even in writing, it's hard to present two sides justly. Not that there's anything just or right about killing - but to understand why a killing happened, I find it necessary to understand the killer himself. But I needn't hav...

There were worse punishments: when Tommy failed a class, Jones sentenced him to fifty whacks with the board of education, and Brian got fifty whacks for refusing to attend services in Los Angeles. It was humiliating, as a macho-posturing teenager, to be spanked in front of the entire congregation, to have a whimper of pain escape your mouth as a microphone was held to it. In 1954, a pastor named Jim Jones opened a new church in Indianapolis called the Peoples Temple. Being charismatic and fully aware of how to influence people, he began preaching his idealistic beliefs and managed to quickly gather a good number of followers. Over the next twenty years, as the church moved from Indiana to California, and ultimately to its deathbed, Guyana, Jones would amass a huge number of followers, many willing to follow him to the ends of the earth, in the hopes of making the world take heed to their socialistic beliefs.  Their temple did make history in 1978, but for its role in the la...

"When I left Adam that day, I told him, 'Honey, I'll be right over there in the lamp department,' and he looked back at me and said, 'I know where you'll be, Mommy.' Those are the last words I ever heard him say. That's the moment I've lived with for twenty-five years, and that is worse than anything some sick son of a bitch could ever say to me." Bringing Adam Home  is a grisly unflinching account of six-year old Adam Walsh's murder and the long jinxed investigation that followed. Many of you might be familiar with the name Adam Walsh - son of America's Most Wanted host, John Walsh and his wife, Revé. He was abducted one day in 1981 from Sears, where his mother left him for a few minutes at an arcade stall and came back to find him missing. He was then murdered by a serial killer, Otis Toole . What follows is a badly put investigative effort that should have solved the case in 1983, but instead neglects evidence, ab...

Title : Columbine Author : Dave Cullen First Published : April 2009 Publisher : Twelve Source : Library 417 pages In a nutshell On April 20, 1999, two boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, left an indelible stamp on the American psyche. Their goal was simple: to blow up their school, Oklahoma City-style, and to leave 'a lasting impression on the world.' Their bombs failed, but the ensuing shooting defined a new era of school violence--irrevocably branding every subsequent shooting 'another Columbine.' This book is the story of Columbine - the story that none of us knew. In this revelatory book, Dave Cullen has delivered a profile of teenage killers that goes to the heart of psychopathology. He lays bare the callous brutality of mastermind Eric Harris and the quavering, suicidal Dylan Klebold, who went to the prom three days earlier and obsessed about love in his journal. Rebecca wondered how I could read Columbine so soon after April 16...

Title : April 16th: Virginia Tech Remembers First Published : August 2007 Publisher : Plume Books Source : Library 323 pages On the flap Monday, April 16, 2007 started like any other Monday at Virginia Tech, with professors and students preparing for another busy week of classes. However, word quickly circulated of a shooting in the dorms - and the gunman was still loose. The campus went into lockdown, and as the gruesome events unfolded in Norris Hall, a group of journalism students trapped in a nearby building transmitted stories and updates to the student-run website, PlanetBlacksburg.com. Now, these students, together with their journalism instructor and members of the Virginia Tech community, have documented the events of that day. April 16th: Virginia Tech Remembers gives a voice to the students, faculty, and staff who lived through the shooting, and serves as a memorial for the 32 victims. The book also describes the onslaught of media coverage that...