Kate Winkler Dawson

"He was the embodiment of all that is wicked."
Researchers still try to explain why some people turn to a life of violence and crime. The case of Edward Rulloff is one that is still fascinating- not because his crimes were so unusual, they were not, unfortunately. What was unusual was that he convinced many prominent people (journalists, alienists, and linguists) that he was "too smart" to be executed. His reputation as a world-class scholar was based on his life-long work on a manuscript that explained the origin of all languages. His theory was debunked and rather than accept a diagnosis of madness, he was hung in 1871. His brain was studied and became part of the first "brain collection." Research on his brain was used by both phrenologists and neurologists to discover the origin of criminal behavior.
Very interesting and well researched.… (más)

(1) This is a true-crime sort of narrative non-fiction account of a toxic fog that beset London in the early 1950's - the first year of QE2's reign. The story is paralleled with a London serial killer who strangled prostitutes in the fog (no, not Jack the Ripper) and hid them under hs floorboards (no, it's not an Edgar Allan Poe story) but despite occurring around the same time frame the two stories had NOTHING to do with one another. I mean; nothing - so the whole context felt forced.

The book toggles between these two unrelated storylines rather unsuccessfully. It becomes more and more clear that linking the two is a real stretch. There are some nice human interest stories of families affected by the fog and some interesting info about coal and pollution and how disgusting the fog actually was - the inside of cloth masks was brown after a few hours from all the particulate matter being inhaled and exhaled. The serial killer storyline - John Reginald Christie - was macabre and bizarre with all the weird false confessions. How could his wife not have known what a creep he was? But on the whole, the writing was pedestrian and the biggest complaint -- it seems like two separate books. Both stories, while tragic, are not that complex which is probably why she conflated them in one book. But there really was no larger message.

The whole experience of reading this was a bit of a chore. No real mystery or dramatic tension or an object lesson necessarily. I think intriguing to explore the beginnings of government's role in stemming pollution and the political divides that existed between liberal and conservative from early on, even across the pond. But overall -- this was just OK for me.… (más)

Two deadly stories that played out in London in 1952. Over the course of several days, the city was covered in a thick layer of smoky fog, condensed into a new word, "smog". The smog was so thick that people could hardly see in front of them, and spending any amount of time in the smog resulted in death for an estimated 12,000 people.
At the same time, a resident of Notting Hill, at the time a slum area of London, was luring women into the flat he shared with his wife. John Reginald Christie was a serial killer whose home, 10 Rillington, has gone down in infamy as the site where so many women, plus an infant and his own wife of 30 years, met their end at the hands of a fussy loser.
Winkler Dawson is always an amazing researcher, unearthing even the tiniest detail, so if you've read about either story before, you're likely to find a lot you hadn't come across before. She even interviewed a 102 year-old who was a patrolman during these events. When it comes to all the Parliament discourse over the smog and the fighting about it's cause and what to do about it, the story drags, but this was the author's first book. I'm a fan of her various podcasts and she can tell a story.… (más)

I got it as this as a girl’s take on something semi-sociological (in a ‘general’ way), popular crime writing; I started to think that I had got a sorta cold-romantic/steely-eyed optimistic thing, like Star Trek or whatever, but eventually I lost a lot of faith in my girl and her choice of hero, who ended up just seeming like a, albeit probs above-average in technical skills, mostly generic representative of a past decade. (My psych textbook says that IQ has been trending up for decades, you know. IQ is probs made up mostly from very little, but I just mention because people assume that the dead are wise, you know. Assumptions, gumptions!) I guess I finished it because, I don’t know; it’s like history/sociology only more everyday (and half-diverse), so, I don’t know. I couldn’t call it ballast, so I finished it!…. I should probably just read straight romances, you know. But it’s hard not to be drawn to the great-great men, and the little-great men, you know. Fascists and captains of war; policemen and captains of the academy; /cinematic sequence/—you know. Well, you probably don’t. Why would you? Would that be a good thing? 😸

…. The 20th century sure had a number of strange customs!

…. I wish that detectives really were like television sleuths, you know. They’d take advanced communication courses, then come home and read Shakespeare while listening to Bach. Or, at least, they wouldn’t be half-man half-machine…. And so bad with money! Well, maybe television sleuths would be bad at money, too; they’d either be afraid of the stuff and think it beneath them, or I guess the audience just thinks that money is for “the good people”, you know—the big people. No, the Twenties Man wasn’t a folk hero of science, not really, although the Dawson character who made that clear doesn’t seem to have noticed the difference. —Why, he wasn’t always a cultured all-around good citizen, and didn’t always get professional, career and personal results, either…. But he read a lot of books, dammit!…. He was better than the rest of us. —A pretty poor opinion you must have of the rest of us poor slobs, Miss Dawson, if all it takes to be better than us is to read a damn fine pile of books! —Oh, damn you; he’s a hero! (sobs)

…. (smiles) I’m quite a strange goose; I know.

Anyway, in a way, it’s a noble attempt—to document the positive, pro-social guy who with his mind and his goodness tried to rectify the imbalance of crime, instead of focusing only on the people who lost their minds and their balance and slipped into crime—but it’s not executed well, you know.

…. I hate to sound like I’m gratuitously provoking scientists, but it is odd sometimes how something so poorly understood generally could be so central to the high-and-proper aspect of our civilization. Some of them are probably content with that, content to be gatekeepers and paid accordingly, at least in prestige, but I don’t know. It’s a problem that’ll probably be more than one century in the undoing of.

…. —It’s these intelligent laymen who are the problem, declared Robbie the Robot. Like judges: they’re all slackers!

It was a very strange time—and so much like our own!… (más)