T.C. Lessons

A great historical true crime: The Enigma Woman

2007-09-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

Kathleen A. Cairns, the author of The Enigma Woman, is a fine historian and writer. The Enigma Woman stands up over time as a great read. It should be coming soon on Kindle. (An academic press moves slowly.) But, as the promoters say, you don't have to take my word for how good this book is. Read below what reviewrs had to say in 2007, when the book was first published.
-- Larry L. Lynch, February 2011

“A new book out this month finally tells us the entire tale of Nellie Madison for the first time, and it is so terrifically researched, so well put together, you might forget the story took place in 1934. . . . A physically lovely, beautifully produced book. . . . The Enigma Woman is top-shelf stuff for votaries of high quality historic crime stories. Professor Cairns will keep you mesmerized in contemplation of a most curious murder case, one in which our recalcitrant heroine could not speak until she was within the shadows of the gallows, one in which the victim may well have had it coming in spades and by golly got it.” —Laura James, in a May entry in CLEWS, The Historic Crime Blog

“By charting Madison’s experiences from the 1910s to the 1940s, Cairns offers critical insight on the deeds and misdeeds of one remarkable woman, who in many regards was a victim herself. By framing events the way she does, Cairns gives Madison’s story the context it needs and deserves.”—Christina Eng, San Francisco Chronicle

“Cairns tells her story with considerable sociological and psychological acuity. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this tale is how the cut-and-dried, seemingly heartless justice system of the 1930s ultimately produced a punishment that was just and enlightened and would generally satisfy today's more liberal attitudes toward spousal abuse and homicide.”—The Atlantic

Nellie was pegged by the media as a femme fatale, a character out of a noir tale. The author has done considerable research in this well-written true crime chronicle, but what happened in Nellie's bedroom in 1934 still remains an enigma. --- Publishers Weekly

Nellie May Madison got off on the wrong foot in life. …She eloped at 13, married several times, chain-smoked, drank whiskey and…shot husband No. 5. Convicted of murder, she was sentenced to death. In 1935, the state Supreme Court upheld the sentence — the first time it had done so against a woman. Madison's aloofness earned her such newspaper monikers as "Sphinx Woman" and "Iron Woman." … Supposedly on the advice of her lawyers, she lied on the witness stand, omitting the circumstances of the killing and claiming that the dead man in her apartment was a stranger. Her conduct alienated nearly everyone. "They really wanted to nail her," said Cal Poly San Luis Obispo history lecturer Kathleen A. Cairns. "They didn't like her lifestyle [nor] the fact that she didn't break down and cry." --- From a pre-publication story by Cecilia Rasmussen that appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Feb. 4, 2007

About this blog

2007-09-04T10:12:00.000-07:00

As of February 2011 this true crime blog is still on hold.

This pause will continue for the time being. We may bring it back with the publication of a new book.

Watch for RememberingTheArgus

2007-08-05T11:25:00.000-07:00

My blog RememberingTheArgus is becoming more active with the publishing of my novel Farewell Bend on Kimble.
-- Larry L. Lynch, February 2011

Don't Miss Ann Rule's list of the best

2007-05-19T10:13:00.000-07:00

For true crime aficionados, I doubt that there is a current writer who is more respected than Ann Rule. At least among those who love modern page turners. If you haven't run across her list five favorite true crime books, the sooner you check it out the better. Who knows how long it will last as a free column at the Wall Street Journal site. To get it Goggle on the news side for "Ann Rule true crime list."

Engaging portrait of the human mystery, yes, but what about the idea behind it?

2007-05-15T09:23:00.000-07:00

Frequently we are stunned by examples of how evil strikes without warning to take away our loved ones. The shooting deaths at Virginia Tech are only the most recent example. Why? we ask. And Why? again. Paul LaRosa’s new book, Nightmare in Napa, is a sympathetic, human retelling of one of those stories, set in a middle class enclave of California wine country. All who knew the two young women who were brutally stabbed to death in a tiny Napa cottage they shared with a third girl friend could not have been more shocked by the murders. Family and some friends may never really recover from that shock. LaRosa details the lives of these people with an engaging, clear style of writing. He takes us through to the surprise confession of the murderer. He confronts the why. And still it hangs in the air. In the end, as with many a good true crime recounting, what remains with the reader are the questions not the answers.

Nightmare in Napa is a book is of more than passing interest because it grew out of a decision by the CBS TV show “48 Hours Mystery” to track the people involved during the investigation and to have a book written in connection with their production. In the end, the TV show’s staff members were shocked to learn that the murderer was so close to people involved that he had attended their tapings, urging one participant not to cooperate but otherwise attracting little attention. LaRosa writes of all of this without a trace of self indulgence. His book is a good piece of journalism but one that unlikely to be followed up with the same professionalism if the idea of writing books off true crime TV shows becomes a trend. Story tellers are just too tempted to make themselves the story and to hype the facts out of some misguided idea that leads to more sales.

How true crime birthed the Western

2007-05-06T14:41:00.000-07:00

On July 20, 1899, a robust hog farmer and prostitute and her innkeeper friend were strung up on a stunted pine overlooking Spring Creek Gulch. A detective working for the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association led the gang of lynchers..

Johnson County’s hard-up cowboys turned homesteaders, whom the cattlemen labeled cow “rustlers,” reacted with anger and fear and began arming themselves.

But the association initiated a plan to deal with that. It assembled a small army of 19 cattlemen, 21 Texas gunslingers, another hired killer brought in from Nampa, Idaho. Their intent was to eradicate somewhere between 19 and 70 Johnson County “rustlers” --- homesteaders the cattlemen decided didn’t deserve to occupy a piece of the open range.

Things came to a head during the blizzardy spring of 1892 when the cattlemen’s “army” detrained at Casper and rode off toward the town of Buffalo, Wyoming where its leaders hoped to corner most of their victims.

The army of “regulators” began by surrounding the small ranch of Nate Champion, labeled “the bravest man in Johnson County” by one of the newspaper writers who chronicled the Johnson County war from its roots in the 1890s spring roundups to the lawlessness that followed.

Warned by the slaying of Champion, a spontaneous citizen militia made up of homesteaders from Buffalo and environs, maybe 200 strong, surrounded the gunslingers at a cattlemen’s ranch and threatened to obliterate them.

President Benjamin Harrison was forced to send in the Calvary to rescue the cattlemen’s crew, marching it off to Cheyenne where the whole gang was more or less incarcerated (mostly less) until they were cleared of all criminal charges.

This true crime story --- if the West could have true crime before it actually had much law --- is recounted in wonderful detail by Helena Huntington Smith in her 1966 book, The War on Powder River, still available from the University of Nebraska press.

Smith tells this story with an engaging true to life flavor. To accomplish this she uses letters written by the cattlemen themselves, an abundance of not-quite-objective but many sided accounts by writers from the East and by Wyoming’s country editors at the time. All this is supplemented with information from a few books and “confessions” produced by participants.

For anyone who has been fascinated by Westerns in film and on TV, this book should become a must read. Larry McMurtry not withstanding, it is probably as close as anyone is likely to come to “the true story” behind the myth that underlies the West.

As mentioned in an earlier blog, I was tipped to Smith’s book by LSU film theorist Patrick McGee at the recent Colorado Springs conference on media and violence. In a 2006 book of his own, McGee traces how the events in Johnson County inspired the seminal Western novel The Virginian by Owen Wister and many Western films that followed. (McGee’s book is From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western.)

For a web-based quick history that may be intentionally short on some details, try out the “wyomingtalesandtrails” reference that comes up when you Google “The Johnson County War Wyoming.” Wikipedia also has a useful but incomplete rundown. It fails to mention Smith’s book but suggests that the disastrous 1980s movie Heaven’s Gate came close to following the true story, which is not correct. That flick is bad history as well as bad moviemaking. Somewhat ironically, the movie went so far over budget and did so poorly at the box office that Hollywood’s money men aren’t likely to have another go at the actual story anytime soon.

In his conference presentation, McGee discussed his personal fascination with the way the stories of the old west based on The Johnson County war have moved over time from being sympathetic to the capitalist cattlemen to showing how the common homesteaders were victimized. I have yet to read his book, but it has moved to the top of my list along with The Virginian.

Anyone interested in the story with plans to visit Wyoming might check out Buffalo’s city web site before heading out. It looks like some there are beginning to relish the story. They have just this spring erected a statue of Nate Champion.

Virginia Tech massacre leads to thoughtful true crime blogs

2007-04-19T15:15:00.000-07:00

This seems like a watershed moment for true crime. The genre flicks are filling up the big screen as well as TV screens. Books are multiplying so fast even a serious blogger-reviewer can’t keep track. And now comes the massacre at Virginia Tech.

We want to credit the people who write for and edit the TrueCrimeBlog and CrimeBlog.US with keeping their response to the Virginia mess both informative and thoughtful. In her entry, Laura James, who is a senior contributor to Crimeblog and has her own historic true crime blog CLEWS, reminds us that this rampage is not unprecedented in American history going back as far as the 1920s. In 1927 in Bath, Michican, an angry and no-doubt mentally ill school trustee blew up a school full of students, then himself and the school superintendent, killing 45 students and townspeople.

If that event, which spawned at least two books, was mentioned in the coverage of the atrocity at Virginia Tech, I missed it. The TV anchors were, instead, intent on calling this week’s tragedy the “the worst school shooting” in American history, or the worst shooting at any location in the history of the country.

The story of the Bath School Disaster suggests there must be multiple reasons for people to do insanely destructive things. Limiting the impact of modern video games and media coverage that encourages copycat killers might help forestall some acts of violence. But the way that the human thought process sometimes goes awry ultimately causes the damage.

At the same web site, true crime author Kathryn Casey succinctly captured the terrible personal impact of these events in her guest blog at CrimeBlog.US., title “Making sense of losses.” Her point, ultimately, is that some people whose family members are killed in these events can go on to turn their experiences into “painful” personal “gains.” She takes note of the effort of a mother of a young woman who was brutally murdered to encourage the Texas legislature to provide counseling to jurors who must learn all the details of such crimes.

Of course, if readers here are dedicated true crime surfers of the Internet, they have undoubtedly discovered these entries themselves before coming to this site. But I couldn’t help but applaud the perspective of these two bloggers. They have advanced our theme of finding important lessons in the crimes that plague our lives.

To further that end, I offer up brief reviews of two books in the entry below. The books focus on what I think are truly instructional stories of two quite different types.

BUT FIRST A NOTE: I plan to continue the practice of leading readers to news stories and other blog entries that I think are informative --- usually items from small newspapers or blogs that are missing from the mainstream media. My excuse for not being more creative is that I’m deeply involved in other writing projects. And I’m caught up in reading Helena Huntington Smith’s 1966 work, “The War on Powder River” published by the University of Nebraska Press. It’s the story of a seminal conflict in the history of the American West, culminating in the killing of Nate Champion, who Smith describes as “the king of cattle thieves and the bravest man in Johnson County.” One day I’ll post some thoughts about that conflict and it’s importance in Western Literature. But more on that later. The point of this aside is to remind readers that if they want to be alerted when a new posting is made here, linking them to a story I fiend interesting, I believe Google will do that. Or maybe most readers are already overwhelmed with true crime stimulus, I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s become enough to make me rethink my own involvement. I’ll try hard not to be duplicative

Two different true crime books well worth reading

2007-04-19T15:11:00.000-07:00

Erik Larson’s 2003 volume “The Devil in the White City” is as fine a historical true crime tale as I’ve run across. He has a later book written on a similar pattern that I haven’t yet read, but I would be inclined to believe it is also marvelous. Larson’s approach to “The Devil” is to track the life arc of a murderer during an event of large historical significance. In this case, that’s the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the “White City” referred to in the title. The murderer is man who used the draw of the fair to isolate and dismember one young woman after another --- the number apparently never totally determined. Larson did an immense amount of research and yet stepped back from that effort enough to craft a thoroughly readable and well-integrated story that moves along almost effortlessly. It’s a gem.

Now for “24 Days: How Two Wall Street Journal Reporters Uncovered the Lies that Destroyed Faith in Corporate America.” In this fascinating study of white collar crime, reporters Rebecca Smith and John R. Emshwiller describe in detail how they helped make the criminal excesses of the top executives at Enron the kind of front page news that brought the company crashing down. This is a story of how good journalism works, whether you like it or not --- and clearly a number of Enron executives, employees and stockholders would like to blame the media for what happened to them. Jeff Skilling, the ex-Enron CEO who is now serving time, tried that “run on the bank” defense when he testified before Congress. But Enron was a house of cards that was built to crash. For a time, before it was exposed, the energy company seemed to be a monster that was capable of bankrupting the state of California. Smith and Emshwiller didn’t actually break the story on their own. But they had been working on it for months so that they were able to provide critical background details when the company came out with its duplicitous and disastrous third-quarter earnings report on Oct. 16, 2001. The average reader won’t understand all of the details of the Enron scams. Neither did the reporters. But anyone who works through this book will come away with a sense of how modern accounting can hide a massive ponzi scheme. Read it and learn.

The Enigma Woman --- The Death Sentence of Nellie May Madison

2007-03-31T13:10:00.000-07:00

The accused murderer known to 1934 Los Angelinos as Nellie May Madison had come a long way from the Montana of her child hood when she sat on the witness stand at her trial and claimed the body found on the floor of her apartment was that of a stranger. It seems to the modern reader a far stretch for her defense attorney to encourage her to make that claim. But Los Angeles in those days was a noir kind of place and strange stories sometimes worked. Nellie’s attorney convinced her that as a much married and childless woman she was not going to get off by claiming self defense when the victim was found shot in the back. It was the era of Bonnie and Clyde and L.A. authorities, led by hanging judge Charles Fricke, were clearly out to prove that a woman who’d become notorious couldn’t get away with killing her man.

As Kathleen Cairns lays out the engrossing story of how the accused and her brother, a former sheriff from Montana, dealt with all her plight, I came to feel truly sorry for Nellie even though it was clear she pulled the trigger.

I think if you read this book you’ll not forget “The Enigma Woman” --- a proud, “crack shot” Irish girl from off a Montana sheep ranch. She never gave up, never wanted to see herself as a victim.

Cairns renders her story with the impact of a fine writer possessed by her subject and with the thoroughness of a solid researcher. In the end, the reader gets to decide whether Eric Madison indeed “had it coming.”

For more information see the listing on my favorite links.

The Innocent Man --- Murder and Justice in a Small Town

2007-03-31T11:03:00.000-07:00

John Grisham chose a compelling story to feature in his true crime book about Ron Williamson’s scandalous treatment at the hands of Ada, Oklahoma police and prosecutors. It’s too bad the book is not quite as great a read as it is an important and empathetic discussion of justice gone awry. Now I understand he’s signed onto a movie deal for the book, a film that I’ll no doubt rush out to see. Grisham may write better when he relies on his imagination rather than the record, but I’m truly thankful that he made the effort to write this book and I’m pleased he’s apparently gone on to help the unfortunate soul who was convicted with Williamson, Dennis Fritz, sell his own book about the experience. Don’t give up on the true crime genre John. You’ll get better at it.

Murder in Greenwich

2007-03-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

Mark Fuhrman is more of a cop than a writer and this book has few pretensions, but that’s one reason Murder in Greenwich makes a good read. And even though it is based on a sensational case that is generally well-known by followers of political and-or celebrity gossip, it delves into details in a way that keeps a reader with the story page by page. It also has cautionary value. Parents of some of the victim’s friends knew better than to trust the likely killer or killers. Parents be warned --- trust your inclinations.

All of that said, this is a lightweight book about people who have more money than sense and the problem of insular small town police departments. Like John Grisham’s The Innocent Man, the story can disgust you enough to put the book down wondering “what is wrong with these people?”

In the end, Fuhrman’s work is noteworthy because it deserves some credit for making a strong circumstantial case that Michael Skakel --- of the extended Kennedy family --- was involved in the murder. After it was published by Harper Collins in 1998, Skakel was brought to trial and ultimately convicted of the murder. While the victim’s family has credited the police work of Connecticut law enforcement, it remains an open question whether anyone would have followed through with an indictment if Fuhrman had not put together a compelling case.

In sum, there is not a lot of texture to enjoy in this book, there is more than a little drive to the narrative.

COMING REVIEWS

24 Days --- How two Wall Street Journal reporters uncovered the lies that destroyed faith in corporate America, Devil in the White City, and my truly obscure find, True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality.

The Poet and the Murderer

2007-03-18T11:18:00.000-07:00

Simon Worral is clearly an accomplished writer and his book, The Poet and the Murderer, demonstrates that skill. It’s a fascinating story about a forger who earns a good living faking historical documents, mainly those that could be important to the Mormon Church. The reader learns a great deal about how document forgery is accomplished, about how little concern the nation’s major auction houses demonstrate for the validity of what they put on the block, and about the roots of Mormonism.

The only problem with the book is that the story wanders around in interesting but not necessarily riveting detail --- detail that sometimes loses sight of the story line. What was auctioned off as a poem of Emily Dickinson frames the story in an opening that zeros in on the purchaser, Daniel Lombardo, then the curator of special collections for the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts, the center of Dickinson lore.

The character who turns out to be a forger and murderer, Mark Hoffman, fails to come alive in the sense one can identify with him, or pity him or even be truly appalled by him. Raised a Mormon and obsessed by the church, he is portrayed as mechanical man. If his crime had been foreshadowed in greater detail, with a more sympathetic portrayal of the victims, I think the story would have held more of my attention.

But it is wrong to be too critical of Worral’s work, which is an easy read. I just wanted more. That is not a bad way to leave a reader, but it does seem that more might have been available to Worral, more of what I wanted to know about Lombardo as well as Hoffman’s victims. Finally I’d like to have footnotes on Worral’s detailed analysis of the early years of Mormonism, or at least some citations of his secondary sources, so I could easily follow up where my interest was stimulated by this book.

Playing Hoax to Zodiac

2007-03-18T11:16:00.000-07:00

In case you hadn't noticed, true crime stories are making the rounds of the theaters. I decided it was worth spending some time with the books that spawned Zodiac and The Hoax.

The Hoax, due out on film in a few weeks, is the more rewarding book of the two. The tell-all story by Clifford Irving entertains with detail, gracefulness and unselfconscious prose, though the author himself is easily despised. Irving's version of the story was of particular interest to me because I happened to be, in another lifetime, something of a Howard Hughes buff and an acquaintance of Jim Phelan. It was a well-researched Phelan manuscript was grist for Irving's prodigiously audacious and in the end criminal attempt to sell, and then produce, a fake autobiography of Hughes. I can still picture Phelan charging into the newsroom at the Long Beach Press-Telegram, his manuscript under his arm, having to tell his friends there that he was off to New York to prove that Irving was a plagiarizer, a liar and a thief.

As Irving tells the story --- under threat of returning to jail, he insists --- he began larking with the idea, got caught up in the excitement of his own plan, and sold it to his publisher for an advance of a couple of hundred grand. He worked the book all the way until it was ready to go to print, got caught and ultimately tried to give most of the money back as he found himself headed to prison. As with many true crime accounts, all of this is known to the reader from the outset of the book. It's how Irving's caper evolved that makes this off beat true crime story engaging. Awfully impressed with himself, as Irving would have had to be to, he spends too much verbiage in the middle of the book on some of the fanciful stories he made up about Hughes. But the opening chapters are wonderful and the story works all the way to the end.

Zodiac Unmasked, which is the first Roger Graysmith version of Zodiac story that I could get my hands on, reads like one long unedited police report of the disjointed kind that I used to plow through in police stations across Los Angeles County. If you see the movie and want to know more, you might want to try it out. I am still interested enough in the story to see the movie, which many critics have suggested drones on too long. I can put up with that, but if I were starting over I'd be inclined to skip the book.

The Johnson County War and who killed Nicole?

2007-03-14T22:36:00.000-07:00

Both the Johnson County War and the O.J. Simpson case are true crime landmarks and both came under discussion at the conference on The Image of Violence in Literature, Media, and Society last weekend in Colorado Springs.

Ones could guess that a conference like this might bring together a host of criminologists who would spend their time complaining about how reporters get in the way of their investigations.

Not so. What we ran into were mostly literature professors with books in the works, and their students, whose investigations involve things like why Cormac MacCarthy uses no quotation marks. Our own guess --- to inspire literary criticism.

University of New Haven’s famed criminologist Henry C. Lee showed up Friday night to wow the crowd with his quick wit and pointed insights. Lee argued that the evidence in the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson suggested their were two murderers using two knives and at least two sets of unexplained bloody footprints at the scene. Dr. Lee showed a picture of Nicole’s body that indicated police botched the crime scene investigation by failing to collect DNA from a bloody droplet on her shoulder, blood that must have dripped from a cut on one of the killers. He also hinted --- but only hinted --- at who one of the killers might have been. There might be more in Cracking More Cases, Lee’s 2004 book with co-author Thomas W. O’Neil, which goes into the Simpson case. It should be noted that Lee testified for the defense at the trial, although he insists that he stuck to the facts and even angered O.J.’s attorneys by being supportive of the value of DNA evidence.

The story of the Johnson County War may be less familiar though it was a bedrock historical “true crime” event. The war took place in Wyoming before the end of the 19^th Century and involved a battle between settlers and cattle barons that inspired one of the first classics of Western literature, The Virginian. The notable thing about that novel, in our “post-modern” times, is that it takes the side of the cattle barons. Patrick McGee of Louisiana State University, author of From Shane to Kill Bill, has traced how that rather limited range war inspired much of the western fiction that followed. McGee said it was not until the 1930s that writers and film-makers switched sides in portraying the frontier battles between poor homesteaders and the great land-owning capitalists who hired gunslingers to run them off. For a book that details the war itself, McGee suggested The War on Powder River by H. H. Smith is the most detailed and academic. We’ll be looking into that ourselves as time goes by.

And one day --- or week --- we’ll spend some time with one of Lee’s books though our list is getting long and the lawn needs mowing.

The Murder of Helen Jewett

2007-03-14T22:33:00.000-07:00

This blog aims to help readers find the true crime stories that, for reasons of this writer’s particular interests, equal or exceed Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Tommy Thompson’s Blood and Money.

Our particular interests include, but are not limited to, finding an educational and involving story that carries all the way to its end. We also look for cultural and historical value when it’s well embedded. The simply sensational is of little interest, and I’m trying to search off the beaten path to find true crime books that measure up.

The Murder of Helen Jewett by Patricia Cline Cohen. was recommended by an academic friend as a true crime effort with historical weight. She couldn’t have been more correct about the weight business. The story of the murder of a New York City prostitute in 1836 generally interested me. I noticed before I started reading that one reviewer on Amazon commented that the book itself was more of a history lesson than she was interested in. For non-academic readers, I think that bottom line would usually hold true.

I spent hours with Cline’s work and, at the outset, felt well rewarded for the time spent. If detail and context were enough to make a great book, this would qualify. Few books that I have read contain as much detail as carefully analyzed as this one. Much of it illustrates the business of newspapers directed at the common person during the 1830s, something that I have a passing interest in, but it was all too much. By the time I had reached Chapter 4 on “The New York Sex Trade,” I knew the basic story and most of the key characters in some detail, and I knew Cline’s approach would be to analyze, reanalyze and again reanalyze each aspect of the murder so thoroughly that I couldn’t stay with the repetition. I skipped to the end, found out what happened with the likely murderer and moved on to another book.

That said, her work seems to hold up in terms of relatively frequent purchases on Amazon years after publication, probably as a result of being frequently assigned as required reading in history courses. Personally, I’d have liked it more if she had found an editor determined to serve the reader. Close, research-based document analysis makes good academic work, but it loses a reader looking for the true-crime counterpart of P.D. James.

What to expect

2007-03-05T12:09:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, March 8. 2007, I will be in Colorado Springs listening to a bunch of academics talk about the relationship between media and crime. Given the titles of most of their talks, I don’t expect to learn a lot that will be useful. But you always have to hope. Anyway, when I return I’ll post a report here about anything that “might” provide interesting perspective on the public’s passion for true crime stories delivered by newspapers, books, movies, magazine articles, Podcasts, TV news and the Internet.

If you have guessed that “TC” stands for true crime, you’re correct. For the time being at least I’m keeping my actual identity a not too carefully guarded secret. I think it will help me be a little more honest than I might otherwise be, and some of my personal relationships won’t suffer from whatever fallout may come by way of being critical of other writers.

I’m not really a critic. I prefer to try to be creative and leave others room to try and fail, if they must, on the way to success.

But this blog’s main point will be the search for what I consider the perfect read in the true crime genre. Much of what is posted will be reviews of books that I’ve been lead to because I hope they will provide more than a sensational story. I like to be educated as I’m entertained, to learn something about life, or the past. At least I hope to find a well-told cautionary tale. Books that resemble horror stories don’t interest me. Don’t look for them here.

If you’ve found this blog before I build up some content and some rhythm, please have patience. I hope to make it worth checking out before I call attention to it. When I actually start casting about for readers, there will be an email address to communicate with us. I will be looking for comment, tips, and posting the reviews of others if I think they advance the search.