Ian
His essays on sports and pop culture are like junk food for my brain. Hidden in all that junk there are two real brain worm essays on the Unabomber and the tyranny of irony.
Reading this immediately after watching Once Upon a Time in Hollywood left my mind in summer of ‘69 and its cultural effect on the years following for a few weeks. Both Doc & Bigfoot are perfect characterizations of both sides of the Hippy/Square continuum.
Following the plot can be a little hazy at times but I found it thoroughly enjoyable.
Read the book before you listen to the podcast!
While Farrow claims there is nothing “revealed” in the podcast, it does reveal the entire framing of the story. As such, I spent the entire read knowing the resolution of all the investigative/journalistic conflict. This made it a four-star experience for me despite it being an incredible book.
The book itself is really, really good. It's just so frustrating. Somehow absolutely astonishing and yet devastatingly unsurprising at the same time.
3.5
I really like this book, but I felt it suffered from its organization greatly. There is a lengthy transcript that rests dead in the middle of the book. I found it took me entirely out of the narrative, and I wasn't able to get myself all the way back in. If there had been some mechanism for us to ‘find' parts of the transcript, to have them introduced a few at a time, this could have been one of my favourite books.
Edit:
2.5
Man, every time I have a conversation with someone else who read this book I remember how bad some of it was.
Overall, this book was entertaining and provided an interesting lens to re-evaluate stories that I was already familiar with.
I found his treatment of the Stanford rape case & Sandra Bland very troublesome.
He spent way too much time describing the events from the perspective of Brock Turner. He barely slips in at the end his story was likely shaped by his lawyers and did not align well with his statements or actions at the time of his arrest. I just couldn't get my head around what point he was trying to draw with his strange teetotaler sentiment either. It's as though he was ready to conclude that sexual assault at college campuses wasn't an issue until binge drinking came into existence... what?
Sandra Bland was a bit more excusable, he makes a compelling case for how this specific vehicular search policy could have led to raised tensions. He mentions yet fails to address the many of other BLM adjacent cases that do not involve vehicles - just racism.
Edit:
re: teetolerism - I heard an interview with Gladwell earlier this week where he clarified that his position was to show that Turner was not just responsible for his actions but also what goes in his body/what happens afterward. If that was his intent, I don't think it was communicated very well. Most of the discussion of alcohol in this chapter is the cataloguing of every oz of liquor drank by the victim, the effect of binge drinking on women and other statistics focused around the victim.
brutal.
undeniably a Great novel, but I will never reread it and would not suggest it to anyone.
unbelievable writer but I'm a bit too young for a lot of the subject matter to hit squarely
This book is excellent. It uses the disappearance of Jean McConville as a thread from which to hang the stories of former IRA members, historical context, and a lot of pain and suffering.
I found the IRA's unwelcome shift of a paramilitary organization fighting an unacknowledged war to a political party maintaining fragile, unsatisfying peace to be particularly interesting.
The bulk of this book is not about Jean McConville's disappearance and probably not a traditional ‘true crime' novel. But her story and the story of her children are often brought back at the perfect moment to frame the historical narrative perfectly.
4.5 - I probably would have been better off reading ficciones. Some of the back half essays were well written but not mind melting like the short stories.