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The Killer of Little Shepherds: The Case of the French Ripper and the Birth of Forensic Science - Douglas Starr
by hogsflesh
This is available in hardback from amazon for about £8.50. A Kindle edition is also available, and I daresay a paperback will be along in due course.
Nineteenth century true crime is very popular at the moment, probably due to the success of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. The author of this book is American, so probably not ... consciously cashing in on that trend, but it might account for the slightly clumsy, slightly whimsical title. It isn't clear whether 'the killer of little shepherds' was a nickname given to the killer at the time or one dreamed up here. This is kind of a minor point, and doesn't detract from the book itself, but it did irritate me slightly.
The book gives an account of a French serial killer of the 1890s, Joseph Vacher. He murdered at least eleven people over a number of years, the majority being adolescent farm-workers. Vacher was a vagabond, and by committing his crimes over a vast geographical area, he evaded capture for a long time - no two crimes were investigated by the same people, and it took years for anyone to realise that there were links. The book also details the development of forensic science during the period, with Alexandre Lacassagne of Lyon pioneering techniques in autopsies which advanced the art of criminal investigation immeasurably. A celebrity in his day, Lacassagne was eventually called upon as an expert witness at Vacher's trial, to establish whether the defendant was insane, and whether he would therefore face life in a poorly guarded asylum, or public execution by guillotine.
Vacher was a vile character. Although inevitably the only accounts of him which survive are coloured by his notoriety, he really looked the part of the sinister outsider - a hunched, brooding tramp with a black beard, facial scars and an ear forever dripping pus, usually seen with a sack on his back. He almost feels folkloric, a kind of anti-Father-Christmas. But he deserved all the hatred and fear; his victims were savagely attacked, mutilated in horrifying ways, and frequently raped as they died (he killed boys and girls, favouring anal rape in all cases). Clearly this puts him more in Jack the Ripper's league than the usually run-of-the-mill Victorian murder cases, which seem positively genteel by comparison. Vacher had been in the army, and had served time in an asylum for shooting a woman who spurned his advances. All accounts suggest that he had a terrifying, monumental sense of his own entitlement, and was incapable of seeing anyone else's point of view.
It isn't a book for the faint-hearted. The details of mutilations on Vacher's victims are sometimes a bit light, possibly because those details aren't available. But at the same time as laying out the facts of Vacher's career, it also describes how forensic medicine at the time was carried out, in gut wrenching detail. Particular emphasis is given to the lack of hygiene - surgeons didn't have masks or rubber gloves to protect them - and the descriptions of smells, of putrefaction, and of (for instance) how they would examine the rectums of cadavers are a little gruelling. But as with so many fields of science in the Nineteenth Century, huge leaps forward were made due to the work of Lacassagne and his colleagues.
The book alternates chapters, giving us a look at what Vacher was up to (generally killing people) followed by a chapter on forensics. This works fairly well. The Vacher parts are probably more interesting, just because they're nastier, but it would probably be too much to just read them all one after another without anything to break them up. The chapters about forensic history cover a lot of ground, and are perhaps there to justify the book's existence, as otherwise we'd be left with a rather lurid and unpleasant murder case and nothing else.
But the book demonstrates nicely how important accurate medical knowledge was in solving crime, often amusingly ("...a woman named Adèle Bernard was imprisoned for having an abortion. After three months in jail, she gave birth to a child. The court released her.") It also goes briefly into various theories about people's criminality being evident in their facial features, a discredited idea that has an unpleasantly racist tinge. It does allow for an amusing anecdote about various eminent professors squabbling over whether a skull of a famous murderess showed any signs of criminality, but it's the kind of thing that fed into Nazi racial profiling.
Understanding the deficiencies in medical and forensic knowledge, and the difficulties faced by the French authorities in investigating crimes out in the rural areas, gives useful background in explaining how Vacher could have got away with it for so long. And the book leads up to the big confrontation between Vacher and Lacassagne in court - except that there wasn't really a confrontation, just a scientific professional giving evidence and a man trying increasingly desperately to act like he was mad to save his own neck. I guess history doesn't give us endings like in the movies.
If it feels a bit anti-climactic, that's not the author's fault, and there's a good description of Vacher's execution. I was surprised to learn they still executed people publically in France so late - apparently they continued to do so well into the Twentieth Century. It's odd that Vacher isn't better known. He lacks the mystery of Jack the Ripper, to whom he was inevitably compared, but he's faded into obscurity compared to serial killers operating not much later.
The book is well written, cracking along like a novel, and not throwing irrelevant information at us. It felt slightly patronising that the author told us how to pronounce some of the French names, but maybe they're not taught that kind of thing in America. There are a few pictures (not too gruesome). Happily, I didn't notice many typos, although the dust jacket blurb gives Vacher a circumflex accent he doesn't have in the book itself (Vâcher).
This is a good little book for a bit of gruesome light reading - I got through it in a day without really straining myself. Recommended for fans of true crime, but be sure you're happy with dark subject matter.
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Burying The Bones: Pearl Buck in China - Hilary Spurling
by elkiedee
Peal Buck was born in China in 1892, the 5th of 7 children born to American missionary parents. She learned Chinese before she learned English, and only realised that she was considered a foreigner when the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 forced her family out of her childhood home. Later she became famous for her novels and short stories set in ... China, especially The Good Earth. She won America's most famous literary prize, the Pulitzer, in 1932, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Yet her work is mostly forgotten in the US and Europe, and in the country she loved, her books were banned by Mao's regime after they came to power in 1949.
In Burying the Bones, Hilary Spurling presents a fascinating and readable account of the life of this writer, with all its troubles and contradictions. She has drawn on Buck's own writings and those of some of her friends and family. Spurling is the author of many biographies, but is not an expert on China and found that her research was much more restricted for this book than for others, with just 6 weeks in China and very limited access to research materials not available outside that country. She acknowledges clearly these limitations, which were clearly very frustrating for this professional biographer.
More than a third of the book is about Pearl Buck's family and her childhood, up to her first return to the US to go to college, and this is one of the most interesting parts of the book. Buck wrote a lot about her childhood and growing up. Spurling is clearly interested in women's history and the feminist concerns of the period as they are revealed in Buck's life and work. Buck's mother Carie tragically lost her first 4 children to illness and malnutrition, and then stood up to her husband, insisting that she and the remaining offspring needed a proper home, not to travel around after him. Later, her determination that her daughter should have a university education must have been a rarity in 1910, although from Spurling's account of her years at Randolph-Macon in Virginia, and from other books I've read, American women's educational opportunities were far ahead of those offered in Britain at the time. Buck often wrote about young people struggling to adapt to a move between cultures, between Asia and America.
Buck initially returned to China to see and look after her sick mother in 1914, but stayed for another 20 years, in which she married, wrote her most famous book and several others, had a child who had various learning and physical disabilities, divorced and remarried. She left China with her new husband for various reasons including arrangements for Carol's education and care, and her pariah status among China's expat community (mostly missionaries) as a divorcee. Although the first half of her life, that spent in China, inspired most of her work, and she left the country she loved so much very reluctantly, there is plenty more about her later life back in the US, and this was a life that may have been very difficult and sad at times, but it was clearly never boring. With Richard, she adopted 7 babies within just a few years, intending that they would look after their brood on their own, and she continued her own writing career, bits of this made me feel tired just reading them.
Although the subtitle of the book is "Pearl Buck in China", Spurling actually covers the whole of her subject's life, up until her death aged 80 in 1973, quite comprehensively. There are detailed endnotes in the book though many of them just clarify which book a quotation comes from and I think it's not really necessary to look all the references in the way I did. There is a very comprehensive index. More interestingly for the general reader, there are 16 pages of black and white photographs of Pearl Buck and most of the significant people in her life in the middle of the book. There is a map of "Pearl Buck's China" showing the significant places in her and her family's life at the start of the book. I do think that one extra addition to this book would have been useful - a bibliography of Peal Buck's many novels, short stories and non fiction writings.
Burying the Bones is a very readable account of an interesting life. I say this as someone who has never read any of Pearl Buck's books. I might at least have to read The Good Earth now.
This review first appeared at www.thebookbag.co.uk.
Published by Profile Books April 2011 (the hardback was published in 2010)
Format: Paperback 340 pages
ISBN: 978 1 861 978 523
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What You See Is What You Get - Alan Sugar
by katykicker
=== The story ===
This is the official autobiography of Alan Sugar charting his rise from living as a schoolboy in a council estate to being Lord Sugar an incredibly successful multi-millionaire entrepreneur.
=== The design ===
This book comes in hardback and is fairly simple in design with a nice, ... formal kind of shot of Lord Sugar. This is a current age photograph rather that one from the beginning of the autobiography years. The book looks and feels like it's very weighty, solid and is going to have a lot to say! I feel that this looks like a quality book from the off and I felt like I was getting more for my money just because of how large the book is and that is has over 600 pages.
=== Where can I buy this and for how much? ===
This can be purchased from many different book stores and I purchased mine from Amazon.co.uk for around £6.00 recently, however, the current price (July 2011) is around the £10 mark which I would still say is very reasonable for this book.
=== My overall opinion ===
My main reason for picking up this book is that I have been a fan of 'The Apprentice' since the first series and wanted to learn something more about Lord Sugar. I was also intrigued by a number of good reviews and just general word of mouth. I was pleased with the price I paid for this book and felt that even if it was substandard I'd still enjoy the read and would be getting quite a lot for my money.
I must say that I found this book incredibly interesting and despite it's long length I finished it in just a few days of a recent holiday. The chapters of the book were well laid out and I found that I was able to dip back in and out of the story with minimal problems. Also, at various parts in the book things would be re-explained and earlier events would be briefly mentioned again just to touch on previous things and remind the reader just who was who in the book and why certain things maybe turned out the way that they had. When reading this book I really felt like I was getting a little tiny insight in to the mind of a successful businessman.
The book was incredibly well flowing and simple to read. I didn't find myself getting bored once and there were lots of little witty quips and anecdotes to keep me occupied for the duration. I found that the text was reasonably sized and I could comfortably read the book, without my glasses is necessary. The stories all integrated well together and I didn't end up feeling that I hadn't learn about much of the writers life at all, as I have with other 'celebrity' autobiographies in the past. The stories were also believable and I didn't feel like anything in the book had been added for comedy effect or just to keep the reader captivated. I found that I really did learn a lot about Lord Sugar and he spoke of the highs and lows in his career and I loved just how much he mentions his wife and it really does feel like he still adores her after all these years.
The only downside that I can think of is just how heavy this book is. I would have preferred this in paperback form rather than hardback but as I wanted to read it as soon as possible I didn't want to hang around in placing my order.
Overall it's fair to say that I loved this book, it kept my attention and I found myself wanting to rush other things I was doing to get it read as soon as possible and learn some of Lord Sugar's tricks of the trade. If you are a fan of Lord Sugar or even if you want to glean some potential tips about becoming a successful entrepreneur then why not give this book a try?
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