What I finished:+
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser.
What a weird book. I was excited about this one because I appreciated her
Prairie Fires, a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder that won a Pulitzer, so very much. But this book was...not as good as that one.
Fraser grew up on Mercer Island, Washington in the Puget Sound in the 60s and 70s. In this book, she weaves together a bunch of strands:
* memoir-like scenes of growing up there
* the inordinate amount of serial killers that the state of Washington produced in the 20th century
* overviews of those many serial killers and their activities
* the history of smelting and heavy metal-producing industries in Tacoma (with jaunts to El Paso, Idaho, and Wichita so she can draw in some outside-the-PNW serial killers like BTK and Nightstalker)
* environmental tirades (complimentary) against corporate polluters, particularly the Guggenheims (bonus points for managing not to be antisemitic)
* facts and figures about the dangers of lead and arsenic poisoning and the truly obscene amounts of lead and arsenic people in the Puget Sound area were living with for most of the 20th century
* a series of stories about people who died on a particularly dangerous and irresponsible floating bridge that connected Mercer Island with the mainland
* a somewhat tortured metaphor about the
Olympic–Wallowa lineament* how much Tacoma sucks
Now, actually, many of these things are connected, and I can see how she thought she could make them all work together, but frankly, she didn't quite manage it. At least as far as I'm concerned.
The two main throughlines are Fraser's big ideas: 1. her theory that the ridiculously elevated levels of lead and other metals in the Puget Sound area are the reason there are so many serial killers from the area and 2. her contention that, really, Americans just don't care about human lives when there's money to be made. She may be right about the first idea. She's definitely right about the second.
The trouble is, she doesn't argue any of this straightforwardly. Everything is by implication; she thinks that by having a section about the lead and arsenic pumped into the air above the area of Tacoma where Ted Bundy grew up immediately before a description of something that Ted Bundy did, she's arguing that Ted Bundy did what he did because of lead poisoning, but
she never actually argues that. The book is overwritten in that ~look what impressive prose I'm writing~ way, and it moves rapidly back and forth between various scenes till it's hard to keep up with which serial killer she's talking about at the moment (endless descriptions of young women and the terrible things that happened to them--I skimmed over most of the descriptions. I didn't need that in my life) and who we've met before. She's also very hung up on this particular incredibly dangerous bridge and how the powers that be didn't do anything about it even though people were dying on it at an alarming rate over
decades. It's just so
much.
As for the memoir-y parts, I think that she thinks that she's writing a story about what it's like to grow up in a place where lives are cheap, but the snippets we see of her own life are...not about that. She never tells us how it feels to be surrounded by all this death, so why are the memoir-y parts even there? We learn that her dad was an absolute asshole (definitely emotionally abusive, possibly physically too?), and maybe she wants us to think this is because of lead poisoning too? But she never says that, and the majority of her memories are not about him at all. There's a scene where she goes to a Star Trek con? And I'm like, "Well, I would read an essay about you going to a Trek con in the 70s, but what's it got to do with this book?" Is she just trying to show how life carries on even when people are dying from lead-caused cancer, horrible car wrecks, and unhinged misogynists? I don't think I needed that reminder, really.
She's full of righteous rage about the insane amount of pollution that people have to live (and die) with because some people make a lot of money off pumping it into the air and water. She's full of righteous rage about how nobody cared about all those people dying on the bridge because it would have been expensive to change the bridge. She's very, very good at making you care about needless death. I appreciate those things, but to me, they felt undercut by switching from descriptions of those things over to descriptions of what [serial killer] did to his victims.
As for her theory about serial killers being created by lead poisoning: I think she very well might be onto something here, but because she doesn't argue this in a straightforward manner so she never actually has to confront the weaknesses of her argument. Now, I think the causal relationship between high levels of lead and violent crimes in the US as charted over the course of the 20th century is really quite compelling. I lean towards believing that the two things are indeed connected.
But she's trying to convince us that this kind of lead poisoning produces particularly screwed-up killers, and because she never actually argues this, she never has to answer questions like: why are there way more serial killers in the industrial parts of the Pacific Northwest than in equally polluted parts of the Rust Belt? Why are most serial killers white when we know damn well that communities of color (especially Black and Indigenous ones) have some of the highest rates of environmental poisoning in the country? If the relationship between lead and this specific kind of brutal, misogynist, sexual violence was so straightforward, wouldn't we have seen a lot more serial killers who weren't white? There's this very weird moment where she acknowledges that Black neighborhoods in particular get a ton of pollution and then talks about the moral panic over crime in the 80s and 90s, but she's like, "But the real superpredators are white men." I don't disagree with that statement on its own, but in the context of the larger book, what are you trying to say here, lady?
Maybe she has answers to these questions of mine! But she doesn't allow space in the text to ask them, so how do I know?
By keeping her focus so tightly on the Pacific Northwest, she also never has to address what we might learn from similar situations all over the world. There are many, many places where people are still being poisoned by nearby industries; are their crime rates soaring? What do their most violent crimes look like? She briefly visits Ciudad Juarez to imply (because she never, ever does anything as straightforward as argue) that the femicides there were caused by lead poisoning, but that's the only extra-national location she touches on.
The book is readable, it's just frustrating! Like, lady, if you wanted to write a book arguing that lead poisoning caused serial killers, write that book. If you wanted to write a book about what it was like growing up in a place where human lives were taken so lightly, write that book. If you wanted to write a book about how capitalism prizes money over human lives, write that book. As it is, you didn't write any of them. You tried to do it all, you told it in a style over substance way, and so it didn't quite work.
ANYWAY!
I also finished two audiobooks:
+
Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World by Dorian Lynskey. Read by the author, this was a good thing to have on while I worked. Lynskey is very interested in...the stories we tell ourselves about the end of the world, mostly through newspapers, fiction, and film. He divides things up by various potential world-enders--asteroids, the atomic bomb, climate change, etc. He gives us the historical context of these stories--the 1816 year without a summer, the development of the atomic bomb, the theories that people had about nuclear winter--but he's mostly concerned about how the wider culture talked about these ideas both overtly and implicitly. There's a ton in here about very weird texts written by very misanthropic white dudes, but it's all very interesting.
It's a nice sweeping book, in that he starts with Mary Shelley, goes through Jules Verne, visits a bunch of lesser-known mid-century disaster books, and comes right up to the present day and
Don't Look Up. I thought he did a pretty decent job of balancing the main thing he wants us to remember--that people have been thinking the world was coming to an end since...since the world began, basically, and they've always been wrong--and the fact that climate change is real and is already having major affects on us. Those are hard things to balance!
Two things that made me extremely fond of Lynskey: he is quick to call out misanthropy where he sees it (often his tone is, "Wtf is up with this really weird white dude???") and also thinks that
Deep Impact is a vastly superior movie to
Armageddon in every conceivable way.
+
Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney about the Indo-European language family and its development. I am going to have to read this one myself. It just isn't nearly as suited to audiobook-listening as other books are. But my audiobook hold came in before the ebook one, so I listened to it.
I really dig learning anything we can about pre-history and anything about language development, so I was already inclined to like this book. I appreciated the way that Spinney tries to synthesize the latest theories from archaeology, linguistics, and genetics to create sketches of what life might have been like at various times and in various places. She explains linguistic concepts very clearly and seems especially to love thinking about how people's material situations would have affected how they spoke. She's very clear about when we know things for sure (rarely, given the age of what we're talking about), when things are speculative, which things have a lot of support, which things are fringe theories, etc. It feels like responsible "reporting on academic ideas to a general audience" to me, and that is a very difficult thing to do!
All in all, I think this is a strong book, but I'll need to read it with my own two eyes to properly appreciate it.
What I'm currently reading:+ Re-reading
The Dawn of Everything for a book club. Enjoying it again so far!
+ Half of
The Time of Green Magic, a MG book about a blended family in London and their magical house. Wonderfully written, but I put it aside to finish up the other things I had to finish before they were due at the library. I will definitely finish it though!
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shadowkat
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