Another darkly compelling work from an engrossing storyteller.
A crime historian’s account of a Jekyll-and-Hyde savant who stunned 19th-century America with a series of murders.
By all outward appearances, Edward Rulloff (1819-1871) was highly intelligent and cultured. When he died, his enormous brain—which scientists preserved for study—earned notoriety as belonging to a killer whose gruesome exploits put him in the same league as Jack the Ripper. In her latest page-turning book of historical true crime, Dawson, the author of American Sherlock and Death Is in the Air, examines the life of this “once-lauded scholar, a nineteenth-century polymath who charmed his way to the upper echelons of intellectual society,” all while living the secret, violent life of a serial murderer. After an introductory section, the author begins in 1871, a few weeks before Rulloff’s death, which found him in jail awaiting final word on his proposed execution. Writers, scholars, and alienists (psychiatrists) fascinated with the murderer’s story came to visit him, each for different reasons. “After his past was unmasked,” writes the author, “Rulloff was tantalizing fodder for journalists—a murderer cloaked as an intellectual savant anonymously roaming the streets of 1800s Manhattan.” Journalist Ham Freeman empathized with Rulloff’s hardscrabble past and approached the killer with hopes of gaining “a career-making opportunity” for himself. Greek and Latin scholar George Sawyer sought to disprove Rulloff’s work as a philologist and reveal the killer as nothing more than a clever phony. Many experts believe Rulloff was a high-level psychopath like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. As Dawson chillingly demonstrates, he was remarkably skilled at manipulating people into getting what he wanted; he was able to convince many scholars, for example, that he was completely innocent of his crimes. As the author memorably portrays an unrepentant killer, she engagingly grapples with the still-unresolved question of whether psychopathic evil emerges from brain anomalies or nurture and the environment—or some combination thereof.
Another darkly compelling work from an engrossing storyteller.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-42006-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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