Название: Bloodletters and Badmen: Narrative Encyclopaedia of American Criminals from the Pilgrims to the PresentАвтор: Jay Robert Nash
Издательство: M. Evans & Company
Год: 1995
Формат: EPUB
Размер: 31 Мб
Язык: английский / English
Bloodletters and Badmen is a fine coffee table book about the history of crime in America. Open to pretty much any page and you'll find an intriguing article; and with over six hundred pages there's certainly a lot to get through. The book covers pretty much every type of crook you could imagine, from serial killers and spree murderers, to Depression-era outlaws and Mob bosses, Old West gunslingers and sex offenders, kidnappers and cannibals, swindlers and bank robbers, crimes of passion and assassins. Most of the most notorious crooks are here, along with many obscure ones you're likely to have never heard of. Nash is a fine writer with an electrifying style; his writing style is terse, crisp and wonderfully descriptive. It's passionate, which inevitably leads to bias on occasions, but mostly it makes for gripping reading.
To be sure, much of Nash's stuff is historically suspect, with the occasional hyperbole, exaggeration and misrepresentation. His chapter on Carl Wanderer, the "Ragged Stranger" murderer, has since been disputed by several other crime historians. He inflates notorious mass murderer H.H. Holmes' already grisly body count to epic proportions. He seems to accept the J. Edgar Hoover-propagated story of Ma Barker as criminal mastermind, when most other historians discount that she did anything more than profit off her son's criminal careers. Most questionable is his lengthy advocacy of the theory that John Dillinger somehow faked his own death and escaped justice. So far as I know Nash is about the only serious criminologist to believe this theory, and it's been all but debunked I think by this point in time. Still, Bloodletters and Badmen is an overall fine and fascinating read, an occasional error notwithstanding. Take it with a grain of salt at times, but it's certainly worth one's time.