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3.84 AVERAGE
3.84 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
medium-paced
dark
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
dark
sad
tense
fast-paced
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
dark
informative
sad
tense
fast-paced
I thought the chronology of this novel made a lot of sense and ended up being very compelling. Placing escalating violent symptoms in chronological order with environmental disasters and industrial development made the author’s thesis argument in one smooth narrative. It was a powerful “true crime” book mostly because it could end with a call to action that was a step above “carry pepper spray”. Maybe by supporting a cleaner community without as much exposure to lead and pollutants, we could reduce violent crimes.
You do need to pay attention or else you lose the chronology, and the nature of some of these crimes is very violent. It sometimes crosses over into voyeuristic details about the crimes, but the author largely tries to respect the victims.
You do need to pay attention or else you lose the chronology, and the nature of some of these crimes is very violent. It sometimes crosses over into voyeuristic details about the crimes, but the author largely tries to respect the victims.
challenging
dark
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
Boring, slow. I usually like nonfiction but I struggled with this.
slow-paced
What a bloated mess of a book. I love a good serial killer book, but this is most definitely not one. There’s so many things to talk about I hardly know where to start, but here are the three primary issues I had with it:
- This book is a beautiful example of “correlation does not imply causation.” The link she attempts to draw between environmental pollution and the development of serial murderers is not supported by scientific evidence in the book. She cites a single academic study and doesn’t share any details of that study to allow us to evaluate the scientific merit. It’s the basis of the entire book and she never allows us to be convinced of the validity of her hypothesis. Just because some very bad men grew up in highly polluted areas does not mean one caused the other.
- She provides a very cursory look at a number of infamous serial killers, but if you’ve read anything about Bundy, Ridgeway, Ramirez, Rader, et. al. there is nothing new here you haven’t already heard many times before. It’s a mile wide and an inch deep.
- The book is full of extraneous material that doesn’t even connect to her central thesis, especially lots of talk about the dangerous stretch of I-90 near Mercer Island and her own biography. Both are not only unconnected to the point of the book, but are also not at all interesting.
I could go on, but I’ll just end by saying that reading this book amounted to 16 hours of my life I desperately want back.
dark
informative
slow-paced
Fraser’s thesis is that the toxic landscape of industrial America was a direct cause of the rise of violent crimes committed in and around the 1970s-80s. She focuses specifically on the dramatic influx of serial killers operating in the PNW in that era. However, I’m not sure that she does enough to establish causation no matter how compelling the correlation is. She doesn’t address how telecommunications and the advent of DNA profiling has likely stopped a number of killers before their body counts become higher.
I love how she interwove her personal story, the history of heavy metal pollution in America, and the stories of the victims and their killers. There are also sections about bridges built in Washington at around this same time time. These sections seemed unnecessary as they didn’t seem to tie directly to the main thread of the book: lead poisoning = increase in violent crime.
Also, I could NOT put this book down.
I love how she interwove her personal story, the history of heavy metal pollution in America, and the stories of the victims and their killers. There are also sections about bridges built in Washington at around this same time time. These sections seemed unnecessary as they didn’t seem to tie directly to the main thread of the book: lead poisoning = increase in violent crime.
Also, I could NOT put this book down.