WHACK JOB: A History of Axe Murder, does more than just titillate with true-crime gore

WHACK JOB: A History of Axe Murder
RACHEL McCARTHY JAMES
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A brilliant and bloody examination of the axe's foundational role in human history, from prehistoric violence, to war and executions, to newspaper headlines and popular culture.

For as long as the axe has been in our hands, we have used it to kill.

Much like the wheel, the boat, and the telephone, the axe is a transformative piece of technology—one that has been with us since prehistory. And just as early humans used the axe to chop down trees, hunt for food, and whittle tools, they also used it to murder. Over time, this particular use has as the axe evolved over centuries to fit the needs of new agricultural, architectural, and social development, so have our lethal uses for it.

Whack Job is the story of the axe, first as a convenient danger and then an anachronism, as told through the murders it has been employed in throughout from the first axe murder nearly half a million years ago, to the brutal harnessing of the axe in warfare, to its use in King Henry VIII's favorite method of execution, to Lizzie Borden and the birth of modern pop culture. Whack Job sheds brilliant light on this familiar implement, this most human of weapons. This is a critical examination of violence, an exploration of how technology shapes human conflict, the cruel and sacred rituals of execution and battle, and the ways humanity fits even the most savage impulses into narratives of the past and present.

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My Review: End-noted to a fare-thee-well, this rollicking romp through axes as historical objects isn't academic and dry, or deeply in-depth; it's a mountaintop view into the foothills and valleys of human material culture. Using the axe as our viewpoint stand-in makes a lot of sense. In anthropology classes I took in the 1980s, stone tools came in varieties like flakes, blades, and scrapers, all discovered by the carloads; a hand axe was treasure indeed. The knack of flintknapping is easier to acquire for smaller objects. An axe was high tech indeed.

There's a reason an axe centers the fasces in Roman art; there's a reason the axe was buried as often as a sword in Viking graves. They're not just useful, they're mightily impressive and have always been difficult to fashion until fairly recently. A sharp axe is a supremely useful tool for the agricultural way of life. Splitting logs to burn for warmth, making fenceposts to contain cattle and demarcate property, etc etc, are all made trivially easy with ownership of a good, sharp axe.

Splitting wood is, of course, not the only splitting an axe does with effectiveness and relative ease. Author Rachel starts us with split skulls in Neanderthal prehistory, when possession of an axe was a major symbol of power. As the reasons humans kill each other really haven't changed over the millennia (spoiler alert: we enjoy it), the means we choose to do it with haven't either. Whatever is handy, be it rock, knife, or axe. What we don't know in any detail is why the owner of a particular skeleton was deprived of the ghost driving it, though the remains are clearly damaged in specific, tell-tale ways. So Author Rachel talks about axes more in the first third of the book than murders. (Seriously, stop at 30%...chapter six...if details of what happens are not to your taste.)

In historical times, as details become available, they are vouchsafed you.I do not find this particularly bothersome, but if you do, understand this is not going to be an easy book for you to read. We're still focusing on the axes, though, which is what enabled me not to feel queasy. The weapon of choice is contextualized to the extent possible based on the records surviving, be they legal, social, or religious in nature. And has Author Rachel done her archive diving! Literal hundreds of endnotes could probably result in a visit from the spooks if I followed them all up on Google. The thing I appreciate most in a history like this one, focused on a reasonably narrow bit of human behavior, is that sense the author's done a lot more than the minimum. That is definitely the case here.

I don't classify this as a microhistory to myself. It has a narrow focus. It doesn't, however, confine itself to just one bit of History like The Forger's Spell or Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, both estimable books. I suppose when your topic is something as universal or as ancient as an axe, one can't feasibly stay in the micro.

Speaking of micro, Author Rachel does not spare us Y-chromosome-havers in her analysis of why axes represent authority. There's a good bit about male insecurity as it relates to symbols of power and status. If I felt she was factually incorrect, or grinding an academic axe (!) too finely to make her point, I'd say so. Instead I shrank a little more every time the topic arose. Well done, madam, point well made. Dealing with how the labrys became a feminist/matriarchal symbol was fascinating.

The structural elements of the book are largely thematic. We're in chapters called things like "In Truth, An Enemy and a Man of Violence" (chapter four, the 500s BCE) and "Five Axes in the Cellar, One Axe on the roof" (chapter nine, Lizzie Borden). Author Rachel's style lends itself to hooks, positioned carefully at the ends of chapters. It makes the read hard to portion out; I usually read a chapter of a book, take a few notes, move to a different book; not here. I read through five chapters in a long afternoon. That's not common for me. I simply didn't want to stop, and the hook-y chapter ends (can't quote them, the Spoiler Stasi will trade their hoses and chains for axes) were designed to keep the reader engaged.

So what happened to the fifth star? It's half there, and deserves to be. I can't offer the full five only because the way Author Rachel mixes it up felt at times as though there were topics she could not go into that she wanted to. That left me wishing for an extra hundred pages and more ridden hobbyhorses.

No matter about cavils so minor as that. If you're interested in anthropology and history through a narrow but deep time-lens, have a good tolerance for murderous acts, and enjoy sly witticisms, this is a solid read for you.

THE DEVIL AT HIS ELBOW: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty, in a nutshell: Sick-making

THE DEVIL AT HIS ELBOW: Alex Murdaugh and the Fall of a Southern Dynasty
VALERIE BAUERLEIN
Ballantine Books
$32.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Power, privilege, and blood—this is the definitive and thrilling true story of Alex Murdaugh’s violent downfall, from a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter who has become an authority on the case.

Alex Murdaugh was a benevolent dictator—the president of the South Carolina trial lawyers’ association, a political boss, a part-time prosecutor, and a partner in his family’s law firm. He was always ready with a favor, a drink, and an invitation to Moselle, his family’s 1,700-acre hunting estate. The Murdaugh name ignited respect—and fear—for a hundred miles in any direction.

When he murdered his wife, Maggie, and son Paul at Moselle on a dark summer night, the fragile façade of Alex’s world could no longer hold. His forefathers had covered up a midnight suicide at a remote railroad crossing, a bootlegging ring run from a courthouse, and the attempted murder of a pregnant lover. Alex, too, almost walked away from his unspeakable crimes with his reputation intact, but his downfall was secured by a twist of fate, some stray mistakes, and a fateful decision by an old friend who’d finally seen enough.

Why would a man who had everything kill his wife and grown son? To unwind the roots of Alex’s ruin, award-winning journalist Valerie Bauerlein reported not just from the courthouse every day but also along the backroads and through the tidal marshes of South Carolina’s Lowcountry. When the jurors made their pilgrimage to the crime scene, trying to envision Maggie and Paul’s last moments, she walked right behind them, sensing the ghosts that haunt the Murdaughs’ now-shattered legacy.

Through masterful research and cinematic writing, The Devil at His Elbow is a transporting journey through Alex’s life, the night of the murders, and the investigation that culminated in a trial that held tens of millions spellbound. With her stunning insights and fearless instinct for the truth, Bauerlein uncovers layers of the Murdaugh murder case that have not been told.

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My Review: Sick-making.

True-crime books are not strangers to my TBR himalaya, or my blog. They regularly infuriate me, offend my sense of ma'at, and reorient my moral compass in the direction of "humans are irredeemable scum".

This story marks the second time I have felt physically sick while reading about a true crime. (American Honor Killings was the first.) Author Bauerlein covered the story for the Wall Street Journal because, one assumes, there were so very many financial crimes uncovered in this murder trial. The malpractice, malfeasance, and felony money-laundering are what made the case interesting enough for that bastion of The Establishment to consent to spend resources on the take-down of what is presented as a rogue actor, a bad apple, an outlier. What better way to protect The Establishment than to show it policing itself?

The book details a century's worth of similar, often worse, crimes committed by the same family. Unprosecuted, usually uninvestigated crimes committed as good as out in the open.

But this one's a rogue.

No, he is not, and if #MeToo taught the world anything it's that The Establishment circles the wagons fast to contain the damage. Zoë Kravitz has made this superficial damage control the center of her directorial debut film Blink Twice. Author Bauerlein does not seem to make this connection, though, as she says, Alex Murdaugh had inherited his forebears' power and prowess and then squandered it, the work of a hundred years washed away in blood. Even after digging into the history of these crackers in expensive shoes, her allegiance is firmly to The Establishment, and thus confines condemnation to this scumbag while quietly and indirectly exonerating the evil demon of generational wealth that enabled at the least, caused is more like it, the inevitable rise of the very scumbag she ringingly condemns.

I understood the need to organize the book out of chronological order; there's evidence that otherwise wouldn't fit into the story. It did mean that all the almost-five hundred pages feel weighty, freighted with meanings you can not slip past or you will indeed miss something. It also made the read a week longer for me than it would have been otherwise. Processing the implications of the murderer's inherited sense of entitlement and immunity from consequences was, and is, effortful for me.

Terrible story of a vile scion of ill-gotten wealth squandered, and for a wonder, the criminal punished at long last. A cautionary tale for others in similar circumstances.

The chickens will come home to roost.

THE OTHER DR. GILMER, unnerving murder with serious mental health implications

THE OTHER DR. GILMER: Two Men, a Murder, and an Unlikely Fight for Justice
BENJAMIN GILMER
Ballantine Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

A 2022 New York Public Library Best Adult book!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A rural physician learns that a former doctor at his clinic committed a shocking crime, leading him to uncover an undiagnosed mental health crisis in our broken prison system—a powerful true story expanding on one of the most popular This American Life episodes of all time.

When family physician Dr. Benjamin Gilmer began working at the Cane Creek clinic in rural North Carolina, he was following in the footsteps of a man with the same last name. His predecessor, Dr. Vince Gilmer, was beloved by his patients and community—right up until the shocking moment when he strangled his ailing father and then returned to the clinic for a regular day of work after the murder. He'd been in prison for nearly a decade by the time Benjamin arrived, but Vince's patients would still tell Benjamin they couldn't believe the other Dr. Gilmer was capable of such violence. The more Benjamin looked into Vince's case, the more he knew that something was wrong.

Vince knew, too. He complained from the time he was arrested of his SSRI brain, referring to withdrawal from his anti-depressant medication. When Benjamin visited Vince in prison, he met a man who was obviously fighting his own mind, constantly twitching and veering off into nonsensical tangents. Enlisting This American Life journalist Sarah Koenig, Benjamin resolved to get Vince the help he needed. But time and again, the pair would come up against a prison system that cared little about the mental health of its inmates—despite an estimated one third of them suffering from an untreated mental illness.

In The Other Dr. Gilmer, Dr. Benjamin Gilmer tells of how a caring man was overcome by a perfect storm of rare health conditions, leading to an unimaginable crime. Rather than get treatment, Vince Gilmer was sentenced to life in prison—a life made all the worse by his untrustworthy brain and prison and government officials who dismissed his situation. A large percentage of imprisoned Americans are suffering from mental illness when they commit their crimes and continue to suffer, untreated, in prison. In a country with the highest incarceration rates in the world, Dr. Benjamin Gilmer argues that some crimes need to be healed rather than punished.

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My Review: The carceral economy that makes corporations wealthy is evil.

That's my bias, right there; I make no apologies for it, and if your opinion is otherwise, this review will make you angry and upset, and feel (correctly) that you are being shamed and blamed for your absence of empathy and decency. Doubled if you claim to follow a religion.

A man with Huntington's disease, who was sexually abused by his parent, is serving a life sentence in prison for murdering that parent. Here is what the incarcerated man said to the author, when asked what he wanted this book to show the world when it was written:

Before I left the prison that day in 2018, I asked Vince to tell me the most important things he wanted this book to say. This is what he said:
Prison is torture.
Sexual abuse changes you forever.
We are all at the mercy of our brains.
Listening is healing.

Dr. Vince Gilmer will, it is almost certain, die in prison. There is no cure, or really any treatment, for Huntington's disease. His entire lifetime of service as a family physician in a poor area counted for nothing when weighed against the awful crime of strangling his abuser.

That's the nature of the system. For-profit prisons need prisoners; mental-health services cost a lot of money but make no one any profits. Guess which one we-the-people fund, generously? Mental health services can't guarantee good outcomes, some people can't be helped (Vince Gilmer, for example), so spending taxpayer money on the off-chance that this specific person who has committed a violent crime might be able to benefit? What a waste...there are corporations whose bottom lines could get fatter if he's jammed into jail.

As a result of untreated intergenerational trauma, exacerbated by a fatal degenerative neurological disease likely inherited from the parent who abused Vince Gilmer in childhood, he will die alone, in misery, in a corporate profit center. At the very least his life should end in a cold, uncaring corporate medical-profit center. (There is, at long last, some glimmer of hope for those crushed by medical debts; tiny, inadequate steps towards economic justice are better than the great race backwards occurring on so many fronts.)

If you've read The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row and enjoyed it, you're in the target demographic for the book. If you're thinking "oh pew! this is too hard, too much, too unhappy" then you *should* read it...because your empathy circuits need a bit of exercise. If you're sure peope who commit murder belong in jail, what on Earth are you doing here in the first place?!

GUNPOWDER MOON, a grown-up kick-ass murder mystery-cum-political-thriller

GUNPOWDER MOON
DAVID PEDREIRA
HarperVoyager
$14.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A realistic and chilling vision of life on the Moon, where dust kills as easily as the vacuum of space…but murder is even quicker—a fast-paced, cinematic science fiction thriller, this debut novel combines the inventiveness of The Martian, the intrigue of The Expanse, and the thrills of Red Rising.

The Moon smells like gunpowder. Every lunar walker since Apollo 11 has noticed it: a burnt-metal scent that reminds them of war. Caden Dechert, the chief of the U.S. mining operation on the edge of the Sea of Serenity, thinks the smell is just a trick of the mind—a reminder of his harrowing days as a Marine in the war-torn Middle East back on Earth.

It’s 2072, and lunar helium-3 mining is powering the fusion reactors that are bringing Earth back from environmental disaster. But competing for the richest prize in the history of the world has destroyed the oldest rule in space: Safety for All. When a bomb kills one of Dechert’s diggers on Mare Serenitatis, the haunted veteran goes on the hunt to expose the culprit before more blood is spilled.

But as Dechert races to solve the first murder in the history of the Moon, he gets caught in the crosshairs of two global powers spoiling for a fight. Reluctant to be the match that lights this powder-keg, Dechert knows his life and those of his crew are meaningless to the politicians. Even worse, he knows the killer is still out there, hunting.

In his desperate attempts to save his crew and prevent the catastrophe he sees coming, the former Marine uncovers a dangerous conspiracy that, with one spark, can ignite a full lunar war, wipe out his team . . . and perhaps plunge the Earth back into darkness.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA GOODREADS GIVEAWAY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

“I didn't realize our government considered altruism one of its core competencies," Dechert finally replied. "Is that why we're dropping a treaty that provides free helium-3 for the New Third World?" He started to unstrap his restraints. "I thought it was so we could prove to the orbital executives that we can keep up with their production demands.”
–and–
“Isn't that how most conflicts start? With a gross miscalculation of the possibilities of escalation? A village first, then a peninsula, and then a continent? It is cold up here, commander. Cold and distant. Just a point in space from their viewpoint - valuable but aesthetically detached.”

If we're not just meeting each other, you'll recall my oft-expressed fondness for a pacey, pleasingly noir thriller. That is indeed what we have here. It's 2072; the Moon is split between US and Chinese control; the energy extraction of Humanity's dreams has begun. Caden Dechert is a combat veteran, a polymath and a politically astute loner in charge of the mining operations on US sector of the Moon. After a gigantic disaster more than thirty years ago (Asteroid collisions you can prepare for, carbon emissions you can legislate against, but who expected a subsea methane eruption would plunge us back into the Dark Ages for more than a decade?, asks Caden rhetorically), lunar helium-3 is now the (limited; do we never learn?) resource we need to power the planet.

The thing about using the resources of another world is that it's complicated, requires humans to do complex and still-risky tasks, and exist in an environment that hates you and will kill you in a flash. Caden's job is, in part, to make sure that doesn't happen absent cataclysm...and to head off cataclysm whenever possible. To date he's been a success. Only now the Moon's a crime scene because person(s) unknown have decided to rid Humanity of an innocent waif called Specialist Cole Benson. (Unimportant detail, honestly; how often, in a thriller, does the deadee really matter? That's how one knows it's not a mystery, where it matters a lot.)

What happens from there is an astonishingly fast-paced series of ripples, enacted in meeting rooms and over long, long-distance conference calls. The bureaucracy, the meetings in the face of death, all that's so completely real, so calculatedly cool. No better way to bleed off righteous anger than to have a meeting with the brass. And Dechert, despite his rage and outrage, has caught a scent he really, really doesn't like, a corruption that not even the gunpowder smell of the Moon will hide.

What a truly well-made thriller does best is direct you through misdirection. Keep that in mind, readers. Very firmly in mind.

The dead settle in our mind like cooling embers. After a time they diminish, snuffed out by the immediate, and then a puff of memory rekindles them and for a moment they are hot and near once again.

In discovering the actual intent of the event that killed poor young Specialist Benson, Dechert grows extremely determined to bring true Justice, wearing her Nemesis hat, to the perpetrators of what he regards as appalling immoral acts in service of an unconscionable aim. You've read noir thrillers before. You know this means "badness up the food chain." And that's a discovery Dechert isn't going to let lie, quietly festering. He is, thankfully for his health, talked down off the ledge of taking immediate action. There's a new post awaiting him, one that makes the Moon look like West Virginia: He's shipped out to Europa!

The whys and the wherefores aren't utterly convincing, but I don't care, he's going to EUROPA!! A moon of Jupiter with a huge, huge ocean of liquid brine! Talk about coolness...and talk about remoteness, too, the speed of light takes just over forty minutes to get to Earth from there. That is one hell of a push-off assignment. (I'd take it in a heartbeat.)

So why am I not awarding it all five stars? Because, as much as it pains me to say it, while the tone of the book is right in that indefinable way you feel in your sinews, it's also a message that really, really concerns me at this juncture: Don't trust The Man is an evergreen trope for a reason...The Man's done a lot to earn mistrust over the millennia...but we're facing two severe crises that only The Man can fight effectively, climate change's acceleration and COVID's move from pandemic to endemic and the behavioral changes that NEED to follow on both those things. The noir-lone-wolf-iness of this tale, the one extraordinary man who can put it to rights, is not believable and not timely. That's why the other star fell off my review.

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW: one of the most poignant novella titles I've ever read

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW
WILLIAM MAXWELL
Vintage International
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers—one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy—has been shattered.

Fifty years later, one of those boys—now a grown man—tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who had the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.

My Review: What a beautiful but sad book.

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

So speaks out narrator as he sets out to recreate the end of his childhood. The last gasping breath of an unhappy lad's, I think innocence is too light-hearted a term for it, ignorance of the full measure of unhappiness that others can bear in addition to himself, even if he waits a half-century to get to the meat of the pain:

Whether they are part of a home or home is a part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen–the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washing day, of wool drying in the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.

His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-back copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it.

Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too–the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat-stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

"Cletus" brought to life as an Einsteinian thought experiment, a boy whose remembered existence is defined by a murder committed or a suicide perpetrated or both. Or neither?

But let me say this. My confusion about this issue is paralleled by the narrator's confusion about his own place, his very existence in the world of this little prairie farming town. His father isn't much for feelings, and he's a "sissy" and an artistic child...except for music, the art form his father loves and he knowingly resists learning as his only somewhat outward act of rebellion.

As he turned away I had the feeling he had washed his hands of me. Was I not the kind of little boy he wanted to have?

What strikes me as hilarious, in a not-funny-at-all way, is:

We were both creatures of the period. I doubt if the heavy-businessman-father-and-the-oversensitive-artistic-son syndrome exists anymore. Fathers have grown sensitive and kiss their grown sons when they feel like it, and who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.

Well now, this novella having a publication date of 1980, all I can think is that Maxwell intended this as sly humor. Or else he was deaf and blind.

Sly humor it is.

And it's of a piece with the Maxwellian phrases that abound in this book. It's always so tempting to rush to the Goodreads quotes page and add...almost every line he writes. Retyping the entire book being, then, a real temptation, I add no quotes to the ones already found there. I rely on the mathematical certainty that all of us together are smarter than any one of us individually. Let the hive mind decide which of these sentences are crucial, which best illuminate Maxwell's writerly chops as well as his storyteller's acumen.

But the title of this review gives me away. I want to add something to the quotes page. I can't, though, because even I the "oh-so-what-about-spoilers" King-Emperor feel the last two pages of the story can't be excerpted without making the point of reading the book evaporate.

It is damned near heartbreaking, what those pages say and what it means. I was perfectly glad to read this book, and rate it close to four stars. Then the ending hit me with Negan's baseball bat.

Maxwell wrote a good little story and a perfect ending. That deserves recognition. Read it, please, it won't take long and it will give you something beautiful in return.

GHETTOSIDE, being a jeremiad of a review of a jeremiad of a book

GHETTOSIDE: A True Story of Murder in America
JILL LEOVY
Spiegel & Grau
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street, jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes.

But as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shift.

Here is the kaleidoscopic story of the quintessential, but mostly ignored, American murder—a “ghettoside” killing, one young black man slaying another—and a brilliant and driven cadre of detectives whose creed is to pursue justice for forgotten victims at all costs. Ghettoside is a fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime, an intimate portrait of detectives and a community bonded in tragedy, and a surprising new lens into the great subject of why murder happens in our cities—and how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped.

This book was a holiday gift from a special friend. "Thanks" honey, I love you too.

My Review: I had nightmares reading this damned book. I finish a book a day. This one took me a solid month of on-again, off-again "holy shit I can't, I just can't" reading to finish. I'm a privileged fuck. I always was. I think my one hope for any redemption is that I've never been under any illusion I wasn't. This is a read to make a decent soul scream and rage against the horrors of an everyday reality *in*our*own*country* that is so, so, I can't...I do not possess a word anywhere in my brain that's equal to the towering emotional and political indignation, fury, disgust, horror, agony, grief that I am experiencing.

I'll attempt to be a bit more rational from here on out. I think quoting Leovy herself will help with my incoherent outrage.

Start with this. Leovy's commonsensical reduction of the problem facing our country's law enforcement machinery, the notable lack of a will to do the right thing:

...[T]o assert that black Americans suffer from too little application of the law, not too much, seems at odds with common perception. But the perceived harshness of American criminal justice and its fundamental weakness are in reality two sides of a coin, the former a kind of poor compensation for the latter. Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.

That's pretty much the entire book's point in a nutshell. Understand this, really get it, and you'll be able to read this book without feeling bitch-slapped by the facts. It won't help one iota with the emotional shellacking you're going to take. Yep, that's right laddies and gentlewomen, this another Eat-Your-Spinach Book! Oh boy oh joy, Jeremiah bar Derus slings another jeremiad at ya!

But c'mon, read this and tell me that you can't see why:

Society's efforts to combat this mostly black-on-black murder epidemic were inept, fragmented, underfunded, contorted by a variety of ideological, political, and racial sensitivities. When homicide did get attention, the focus seemed to be on spectacles — mass shootings, celebrity murders — a step removed from the people who were doing most of the dying: black men.

They were the nation's number one crime victims. They were the people hurt most badly and most often, just 6 percent of the country's population but nearly 40 percent of those murdered. People talked a lot about crime in America, but they tended to gloss over this aspect — that a plurality of those killed were not women, children, infants, elders, nor victims of workplace or school shootings. Rather, they were legions of America's black men, many of them unemployed and criminally involved. They were murdered every day, in every city, their bodies stacking up by the thousands, year after year.

These facts constitute an invitation to jeremiadize, no? The appalling stark factual truth makes for bad feelings but better votes, or so I hope. The facts of young Bryant Tennelle's murder aren't unusual. They're quite appallingly routine, in fact. I can't see any reason to pretend otherwise. His father is one of the good guys...a cop...but he was just like a million other young Black men in his neighborhood. And he paid with his life for his father's decision not to leave the world he grew up in, the world of violence and death and grief that generations of political and social inaction at the least destructive and targeted harassment at the worst have created. Make no mistake: Leovy shows clearly that this situation isn't new, isn't accidental, it isn't some ghastly malevolent internal evil inherent in South Central's men. It's us, the rich white people who vote for Law-n-Order for no free rides for moochers for the eternal unchallenged supremacy of Our Kind over the lower orders. Or, to put it simply, Trump's Murrika.

The fact is that this carefully constructed economic and social apartheid has predictable consequences. Among them is the inevitable rise of illegal shadow economies centered around illegal activities. How the hell else are you supposed to be part of this giant consuming machine? It takes money to be one of those getting and spending, and flipping burgers at Mickey D's isn't going to get you an Escalade:

When your business dealings are illegal, you have no legal recourse. Many poor “underclass” men of Watts had little to live on except a couple hundred dollars a month in county General Relief. They “cliqued up” for all sorts of illegal enterprises, not just selling drugs and pimping but also fraudulent check schemes, tax cons, unlicensed car repair businesses, or hair braiding. Some bounced from hustle to hustle. They bartered goods, struck deals, and shared proceeds, all off the books. Violence substituted for contract litigation. Young men in Watts frequently compared their participation in so-called gang culture to the way white-collar businessmen sue customers, competitors, or suppliers in civil courts. They spoke of policing themselves, adjudicating their own disputes. Other people call the police when they need help, explained an East Coast Crip gang member. “We pick up the phone and call our homeboys.”

Unpurse your fucking lips, hypocrite. You're right there with your VISA in your wallet and your mortgage payments met. You're in this hip-deep and you've made it look good in a big public way. Of course everyone else wants it too. Everyone in the world wants it too, and that's how we got this far down the rabbit hole that's rapidly turning into a black hole swallowing the entire substance of the planet. Bryant Tennelle could have had your kind of life, if he'd been able to keep his own. He was a middle-class kid in a world where walking the tables to middle classdom is only possible when you join the alternative economy and its social offshoots, or you sell out and support the "legitimate" system.

One of Skaggs’s colleagues picked up a word a Watts gang member used to describe his neighborhood: ghettoside. the term captured the situation nicely, mixing geography and status with the hustler’s poetic precision and perverse conceit. It was both a place and a predicament, and gave a name to that otherworldly seclusion that all violent black pockets of the country had in common—Athens, Willowbrook, parts of Long Beach, Watts. There was a sameness to these places and the policing that went on in them. John Skaggs was ghettoside all the way.

The author has quite a case of hero worship for John Skaggs. I am right there with her on the fact that he is a decent and honorable man. Based on the book's portrayal of him, I think his desire to do the right thing is just a part of him, like his hair or his eyes.

I can genuinely understand how a man of his caliber would look around and say to himself, "No."

Explicitly confronting the reality of how murder happens in America is the first step toward deciding that it is not acceptable, and that for too long black men have lived inadequately protected by the laws of their own country.

It's obvious and inescapable that this is reality. A man like John Skaggs isn't built to see this and not do what he can to change it. But there's a price to pay for this kind of starchiness. He doesn't come across as a very approachable person. Does that matter? In the wider scheme of things, not really; but it makes the book a bit hard to carry on with at times. Author Leovy's obvious admiration for Skaggs increases the effect.

But listen up, internet-enabled scions of generations of privilege and oppression: Change is Gonna Come. Get on board or you'll really, really, really regret it. Ask the poor white people who voted for Trump. They know.