s&d: True Crime! books

i can't stop this true crime thing, i am just so voyeuristic about these ppl in these books it's bordering on gross. life is too short to worry about that though. i finished in cold blood. i started the good nurse. that one is already so insane and great. i am 10% done. like some commenter on amazon said don't read it on kindle because there are so many footnotes but i'm doing ok, just have to remember the location you left to go back.

did u like in cold blood?

i did but i didn't believe it was true? like is it a novel?

It's a true story that Truman Capote took a lot of artistic license with iirc.

otm

ok, i get it. the good nurse is so terrifying and amazing and fucked up, love it.

ok sold i am going to put it on my kindle for my trip next week :D

Ghettoside is really good. Story unfolds slowly and naturally, respectful of everyone involved imo. I'm only about 45% done but it's a solid book afaict.

I devoured "Cries in the Desert" by John Glatt about the "toy box" torturer / murderer in New Mexico. It was just fascinating, this scene in Truth or Consequences, NM with bikers and drinkers and meth abusers - a lot of people who just live cheaply in the desert and do drugs all of the time. It even has Satanism in it.

This book covers decades of tangled lives--families, lovers, friends, frenemies etc.--in and out of the projects, streets and prisons. Case in point: dealin' prodigy Boy George, a hero to some and sentenced to Life Without Parole by the time he turned 21 (the Rockefeller Laws, solution to drug epidemic uh-huh). So how does he deal with that? Better than I expected, but it's a long & winding road--ditto life in women's prison, which now seems like a prequel to Orange Is The New Black, the series more than the book. The author got to know these people as well as she could, seems like:
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

holy shit Good Nurse (harbl's rec upthread) is kerrrrrrrrazy

i cant put it down!!

yeah and

just have to remember the location you left to go back.

took me half the book to realize you just hit the left arrow :D

yeah u were right abt the footnotes jeez louise

really like the sound of Cries in the Desert but it's not available on kindle in the uk, only america. really don't like reading physical books anymore and even then i'd have to order that from america, mustn't have been published over here. has anyone had this before where a book is only available on kindle in another country? is there any way around this?

Cries in the Desert was interesting because the crimes were part of a sad criminal subculture in some awful desert town.

Anyway, got a fresh stack of crime books this week - currently reading "Harvard and the Unabomber: the education of an American terrorist." It talks a lot about the academic work Ted Kaczynski was exposed to. I worked in academic libraries when the Unabomber was doing his deeds, so I was getting exposed to similar literature. I read a lot of Anarchist and environmental literature back then. I even wanted to quit my urban job to become a park ranger. It includes excerpts from Kaczynski's journal and letters.

I also got True Crime: An American Anthology which is an anthology and history of American writing about crime. Haven't started it yet but it looks fantastic.

Harvard &The Unabomber is really good...def recommended!!!

and the academic work he was exposed to is waaay beyond reading material, lemme tell ya.

I read The Good Nurse last weekend. Good god, just . . . so much to cope with in that book. The idea that someone who is supposed to be caring for you could just blithely kill you, the complete lack of attention at every hospital he worked at. I wish more of the story of the institutional failures had been covered in the book proper rather than the footnotes. After reading I went to YouTube and watched the 60 Minutes story on this, and it included recordings of the phone calls between Somerset and the NJ Poison Control Center. The audible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ from the hospital authorities is staggering.

The hospital's desire to save face in every instance is just so unbelievable

it's interesting how different he is from the mercy killer or angel of grace or whatever. it's all him, it has nothing really to do with them except as means to an end. from what i could figure out, killing all these people was like a stress release instead of going to the gym. the level of dissasociation from his victims was really terrifying

and the numbers are !!!!! O_O

Wow, this Unabomber book is really good. The author, Alston Chase, does a great job of portraying Kaczynski as not at all insane and possibly someone to be envied - he lived in one of the most beautiful places in the United States, didn't have to work for a living, read all of the time....then you get to the pictures and there is bombing material alongside all of that literature...the idea of retreating so you can kill people is horrifying. Other true crime books don't make this point well. It's also stunning to find how much of the same literature you may have read.

I wish someone would do for Timothy McVeigh what Chase does for Kaczynski.

i never felt like chase portrayed kaczynski as someone to be envied, am a liiiiittle concerned that you would come away with that reading imo

I feel moderately guilty that I stopped reading The Road Out of Hell after the demise of Uncle Stewart ... good lord and good recommendation ppl!

Hey, would this be the thread to talk about The Jinx on?

xpost - dont feel bad! even reading up to that point, you feel like you've been *through* some shit

xpost yeah i was wondering, seemed like this would be as good a place as any!

who else watched?

it was pretty satisfying to finish The Jinx and later that day see ROBERT DURST ARRESTED on the scrolling led news thing downtown.

right!?

he's such a strange guy overall...jarecki said in an interview that he thinks durst has a compulsion to putting himself at risk/at odds with those around him, as an explanation for why durst first reached out to do the initial interview

like, if he had kept to himself most of this stuff would just stay buried
then again what's a true crime story without ~ego~

that double eye blink he did every time he told an obvious lie. great stuff. apparently he was carrying a full face latex mask when he was arrested.

!!

the guiltburp at the end was so weird, i was hoping he'd start speaking in tongues

I dunno -- I think Durst and the story are completely fascinating and the series started out very strong, but it totally lost me when the filmmakers started playing Hardy Boys late in the fourth episode. Playing ominous music when it became that Durst had HIRED AN ATTORNEY (GASP! HORROR!) when his wife went missing, that the attorney hired a detective who claimed attorney-client privilege (GASP! ETHICS! BEHAVING IN ACCORD WITH HIS PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES!), and that the detective had prepared a sheet pointing out discrepancies in the client's story (a client who smoked a lot of pot and was drunk). There were no critical questions posed to anyone -- especially cops and DAs -- who claimed Durst had done it. The last episode was too much amateur cop hour, the "confession" hardly that, and I ended up with the feeling that DAs co-opted the project somewhere along the line.

Mind you, I am fairly certain he killed two out of the three people he is said to have killed. I think he had professional help with Suzy and felt bad about it.

He burped when he went up to his brother's house as well.

Ugh I want to see this so bad and we don't have HBO life is so unfair

There are means...

I'm sure he has some Dursty alibi for the alleged confession, like "Gotcha!" And/or "I was just giving you what you wanted," thus launching a thousand more thinkpieces. Also, "I'm craazy, 'member, chopping up the guy and all? I can't hep it (burp]!"

i dont buy that he had help with susan's death.

I'm not selling it. My complaint is that this doc was selling the prosecutorial position.

i never felt that they were "selling" that. durst as a subject makes it kind of hard to *not* end up there just trying to find explanations for his behaviour.

it is pretty formulaic, but i guess i'm so used to this kind of stuff it didnt bother me

But see, I think the Durst Organization's behavior was also weird and disturbing and, frankly, suspicious -- but there was no attempt to "gotcha" them in any way, and I think that because there was no police/prosecutorial support for that project. I think I am the only non-lawyer left who gets mad when the cops frame guilty people, though.

reading The Good Nurse

halp

this shit is making me fucking dizzy

I just read the part where St. Luke's nails him for stealing and using (on someone!!!) tons of vec and when they offered to not press charges and give him 'neutral references' if he resigned, my FUCKING JAW DROPPED. Obv he gets put away eventually but dear god.

yeah that floored me

you guys can borrow this when i'm done with it!

https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/11083862_10153794778677137_2609858839527614647_n.jpg?oh=c6389f26c3b0bc1fe4e11835947a897e&oe=55B0FF2C&__gda__=1434471241_a85fbf41f10c477b3024463520964165

dame say hi to bear

Arghhhh this is nuuuuuuts

So glad I didn't know much about this case

three word username i thought you were a lawyer!
haven't done any jinx watching or looked at any articles about that stuff yet. too busy lawyering atm :(

i haven't seen the series but i loved the dunst durst movie so much. that movie freaked me out in a big way. i had to google that shit after watching because i couldn't believe that it was even near true. (one of the best movies i've seen in a long time and i had no hopes for it. just random netflixing and the fact that i will watch any and all dunst i have missed...)

Haven't practiced for a very long time, but yeah I guess it is a stretch to call myself a "non-lawyer".

i think i'm going to skip the good nurse
seems like it might make me flip out and i can't afford to flip out recreationally atm

it is making me flip out. But also blowing my mind. I feel like it is laying out the nuts and bolts of a specific type of irrational sociopath that I did not previously know about and which -- this is key -- has lessons to teach about the smaller-scale but similar maladaptions we (the merely neurotic) engage in. If that makes sense.

also it has shown me that hospital admin world is way way more fucked than i ever dreamed

Binged on the Jinx this week-end. I could relate to Jarecki (altho, damn that goatee makes it hard to take him seriously) starting out pretty open to hear the guy out and progressively get caught up in the anguish of having to bring down someone he obviously got pretty close to.
But yeah Durst what a character. I dunno if there's such a thing as mild schizo but the constant referring to himself in the 3rd person, the weird risk-taking and the final "confessional" dialogue all point towards a guy very much at odds with himself, to put it mildy.