Rachel MonroeKirja-arvosteluja

I loved the first half of the book. The first two stories were engrossing and I could not put them Dow but I lost interest while reading the back half. Her writing is quite good but what she covered didn’t catch me. This book is about a 2.5 for me. That is all based on the first half.

This was such an amazing read. Not what I thought it was going to be at all, but I wasn't disappointed at all. The exact opposite happened actually. Her writing is amazing I was engaged the entire time, I couldn't put this book to everyone who is interested in true crime even just a little. I would pick up any of her books without hesitation.

Every true crime enthusiast should read this.

When I started to read this book, I felt a bit confused with how the author would jump from one person to another and back again but by the second chapter it got better.

When Monroe talked about the West Memphis Three, I teared up because there are problems and situations like this that have happened in the past and are still recurring even now where "suspects" are being railroaded simply because they look the part. Real killers stay on the loose because law enforcement officials refused to look any where else and they create more victims trying to survive the system.

When Columbine was mentioned it brought me back to the day I was sitting in class watching it. It was so many thing that I couldn't imagine happening at the time and now I fear it every day my child goes to school. There are people who glorify what the gunmen did that day. That truly scares me.

When Lee was mentioned at the beginning of the book about her Nutshells dioramas, it was like... wait someone has made these? And I need to see them. Lee was never the typical house wife, with her pushing the boundaries to make these for law enforcement officials? Brilliant.

Tells stories of four women’s very different encounters with crime and its fascinations. An early self-taught/volunteer crime scene investigator/funder of forensic science; a victim’s rights advocate who glommed on to Sharon Tate’s family with what might be both sincerity and opportunism; a woman who fell in love with a man on death row for a crime he likely didn’t commit and who devoted her life to rescuing him; and a young woman who was an online Nazi and flew to Canada supposedly to carry out a mass murder with her online boyfriend, whose equally half-assed planning prevented any death but his own.

a quick read that wonders (but not too hard) about why people, especially & overwhelmingly women, are drawn to true crime/forensics. it's full of interesting facts & slowly builds a history of forensic science & shies away from a lot of the violence of the crimes that are mentioned which is good for me, somebody who's pretty soft & was drawn to the book because i don't quite understand true crime fandom. this really is a great book about obsession, i think, & all of its strange channels & it's driven by that same chaotic love of information, so a little messy. i've seen some comments about monroe seeking to vilify or condemn the women in this book, but really i think she's just trying to understand & it didn't come off as anything more than that to me... the book maybe suffers from its desire to take stances that tugs at its desire 2 entertain. anyway great beach read.

3.5 This book was chock filled with book coincidences, it was eerie, maybe fated that I picked it up. Monroe explains the attraction reading about crime holds for many, from internet sides full of amateur crime investigators working on cold cases, to those who are attracted to the criminals themselves. Columbine, whose followers have their own groups, people who admire those two young killers of many, calling themselves Columbiners. Starting with the Manson murders, the witchcraft scare, to a young woman, now spending her life in prison. These people sensationlize crime, and those who commit them.

I've always had an interest in people's motivations. What makes them do what they do? From cults to religious affiliations, to those who do what I wrote above. In the 1940s, a socialite also took a heady interest in crime and how they are solved. Why they are committed in the first place. Her name was France Lee and many call her the mother of forensics. She made, what are called nutshells, or dioramas of crime scenes, each on perfect down to the tiniest detail. Had never heard of her before, and this is where the first coincidence comes in. Was watching PBS, the day after I read about her and looked up to see her and her miniatures featured on Wild America. Strange, right?

https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/nutshells

The next confidence is even more startling. The meds I was taking was making it difficult to sleep, so I though I'd listen to this audio and hopefully call asleep. It almost worked, until I was jarred awake, hearing the words, Geneva, Il. This town is only three miles from where I live. Seems a young woman, in her twenties, planned s mass execution with a guy she met on line. She traveled to Nova Scotia, which is where he lived, and thanks to a tip off was arrested at the airport. This happened only four years ago but I had never before heard this story. Her full story and strange relationships are good fully in this book.

So, strange and quite creepy, but well explained, this book was very interesting in many ways.½

Perhaps true crime stories are contemporary fairy tales--not the Disney versions but the dimmer, Grimm-er ones, where the parents are sometimes homicidal, where the young girls don't always make it out of the forest intact. We keep following them into the dark woods anyway. Parts of ourselves long for these shadowy places; we'll discover things there that we can't learn anywhere else.

A friend recommended this book to me when we discussed why we like crime novels so much. What is it about the darkest, more horrible things that one human can do to another that exerts such a draw on our imagination? Her answer was that we're all ghouls, but she also mentioned this book, when I wondered if it was more a way of explaining the inexplicable, of forming a pattern out of disorder. And I have to thank her for the recommendation. Savage Appetites goes deeper into this topic, one that is often raised and written about, and delivers, I think, some plausible answers, or at least a bit of clarity.

Monroe looks at four women, the first woman, Frances Lee, was born over a century ago. Denied the opportunity of a career or even higher education, she'd eventually throw her full efforts into funding a department of forensic science and then, as she saw herself valued only as a cheque-writer, she created a series of dioramas, intended to teach police officers how to look at crime scenes.

The chapter on Lee was followed by chapter about a woman who insinuated herself into the family of a famous murder victim, eventually taking over the role of speaking on behalf of the family and living in their home; a chapter about a woman who felt so compelled to advocate for a man she saw as being falsely convicted that she changed her entire life into fighting for his release, eventually even marrying him; and finally a look at a woman who contemplated murder herself. Monroe used each case study to examine the different ways women are fascinated by crime, from the readers of detective fiction to those who spend hours running down leads in abandoned unsolved crimes, to the dark corners of the internet where murderers have fan clubs.

Detective stories satisfy our desire for tidy solutions. They make the seductive promise that we can tame the chaos of crime by breaking it down into small, comprehensible pieces. They allow us to inhabit the role of the objective observer, someone who exists outside and above the scene of the crime, scrutinizing the horror as if it were a dollhouse.

True crime was once the trashy stepchild of the entertainment world. But in recent years it's undergone a renaissance, driven by female fans who devour books, ID Network TV shows, podcasts, and Netflix documentaries recounting tales of horror inflicted upon innocent victims -- usually white women. Why, in a time when actual violent crime is declining to record-low levels, are we so fascinated by these stories? That's the question Rachel Monroe sets out to answer.

This is not a true-crime book -- some famous cases are briefly summarized here but the focus is on exploring the reason for women's interest in them as entertainment, not in the crimes themselves. Monroe's theory is that women are reading the stories to vicariously experience them from four different points of view: the observant investigator, the tragic victim, the crusading defender, and the evil perpetrator. She provides an example to embody each of these roles and tells their story.

The most engrossing section is the first one about the woman who created the Nutshell dioramas and played a role in launching the science of forensics, probably because that subject is historical and thus easier to pin down. The last section is the least coherent, which seems odd because the author indicated that she interviewed the subject, a teenage homicide groupie. But all the stories present some interesting questions about the psychological value of being so focused on learning details of crimes as entertainment. How much of our interest is really about our sense of justice, and how much may be about self-interest or darker motives? When does our desire to solve the mystery and avenge the victim lead us to find answers that may have been overlooked, and when does it lead to obsession with inserting ourselves into these tragic stories? Monroe's book is an interesting if only somewhat successful attempt to answer these questions, but it's definitely a good read.½

The most interesting section for me was the last, about Lindsay Souvannarath, who I had never read about before. The fact that the first 3 sections were based on events I had already read about made them less memorable for me.