A review by atsundarsingh
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

adventurous challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

I really liked this as a model for doing popular history that reinstates women in their proper place as social actors and as people who act rather than just those that things happen to. As well, I think that this book does a really good job of de-sensationalizing the murders of these 5 women, and putting them in the social context of the allowability of the death of the poor, the addicted, and the female, marking out the ways those existences often overlap. Doing all this, and still managing not to sensationalize (or even really depict) their deaths is a huge accomplishment. 
Expand filter menu Content Warnings