Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Scribner (2019), 272 pages
Description
In this illuminating exploration of women, violence, and obsession, Rachel Monroe interrogates the appeal of true crime through four narratives of fixation. In the 1940s, a bored heiress began creating dollhouse crime scenes depicting murders, suicides, and accidental deaths. Known as the "Mother of Forensic Science," she revolutionized the field of what was then called legal medicine. In the aftermath of the Manson Family murders, a young woman moved into Sharon Tate's guesthouse and, over the next two decades, entwined herself with the Tate family. In the mid-nineties, a landscape architect in Brooklyn fell in love with a convicted murderer, the supposed ringleader of the West Memphis Three, through an intense series of letters. After they married, she devoted her life to getting him freed from death row. And in 2015, a teenager deeply involved in the online fandom for the Columbine killers planned a mass shooting of her own. A combination of personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Savage appetites is a journey into obsession, scrupulously exploring empathy, justice and the persistent appeal of crime.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member sophroniaborgia
True crime was once the trashy stepchild of the entertainment world. But in recent years it's undergone a renaissance, driven by female fans who devour books, ID Network TV shows, podcasts, and Netflix documentaries recounting tales of horror inflicted upon innocent victims -- usually white women.
This is not a true-crime book -- some famous cases are briefly summarized here but the focus is on exploring the reason for women's interest in them as entertainment, not in the crimes themselves. Monroe's theory is that women are reading the stories to vicariously experience them from four different points of view: the observant investigator, the tragic victim, the crusading defender, and the evil perpetrator. She provides an example to embody each of these roles and tells their story.
The most engrossing section is the first one about the woman who created the Nutshell dioramas and played a role in launching the science of forensics, probably because that subject is historical and thus easier to pin down. The last section is the least coherent, which seems odd because the author indicated that she interviewed the subject, a teenage homicide groupie. But all the stories present some interesting questions about the psychological value of being so focused on learning details of crimes as entertainment. How much of our interest is really about our sense of justice, and how much may be about self-interest or darker motives? When does our desire to solve the mystery and avenge the victim lead us to find answers that may have been overlooked, and when does it lead to obsession with inserting ourselves into these tragic stories? Monroe's book is an interesting if only somewhat successful attempt to answer these questions, but it's definitely a good read.
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Why, in a time when actual violent crime is declining to record-low levels, are we so fascinated by these stories? That's the question Rachel Monroe sets out to answer.This is not a true-crime book -- some famous cases are briefly summarized here but the focus is on exploring the reason for women's interest in them as entertainment, not in the crimes themselves. Monroe's theory is that women are reading the stories to vicariously experience them from four different points of view: the observant investigator, the tragic victim, the crusading defender, and the evil perpetrator. She provides an example to embody each of these roles and tells their story.
The most engrossing section is the first one about the woman who created the Nutshell dioramas and played a role in launching the science of forensics, probably because that subject is historical and thus easier to pin down. The last section is the least coherent, which seems odd because the author indicated that she interviewed the subject, a teenage homicide groupie. But all the stories present some interesting questions about the psychological value of being so focused on learning details of crimes as entertainment. How much of our interest is really about our sense of justice, and how much may be about self-interest or darker motives? When does our desire to solve the mystery and avenge the victim lead us to find answers that may have been overlooked, and when does it lead to obsession with inserting ourselves into these tragic stories? Monroe's book is an interesting if only somewhat successful attempt to answer these questions, but it's definitely a good read.
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LibraryThing member dcoward
The most interesting section for me was the last, about Lindsay Souvannarath, who I had never read about before. The fact that the first 3 sections were based on events I had already read about made them less memorable for me.
LibraryThing member RidgewayGirl
Perhaps true crime stories are contemporary fairy tales--not the Disney versions but the dimmer, Grimm-er ones, where the parents are sometimes homicidal, where the young girls don't always make it out of the forest intact. We keep following them into the dark woods anyway. Parts of ourselves long
A friend recommended this book to me when we discussed why we like crime novels so much. What is it about the darkest, more horrible things that one human can do to another that exerts such a draw on our imagination? Her answer was that we're all ghouls, but she also mentioned this book, when I wondered if it was more a way of explaining the inexplicable, of forming a pattern out of disorder. And I have to thank her for the recommendation. Savage Appetites goes deeper into this topic, one that is often raised and written about, and delivers, I think, some plausible answers, or at least a bit of clarity.
Monroe looks at four women, the first woman, Frances Lee, was born over a century ago. Denied the opportunity of a career or even higher education, she'd eventually throw her full efforts into funding a department of forensic science and then, as she saw herself valued only as a cheque-writer, she created a series of dioramas, intended to teach police officers how to look at crime scenes.
The chapter on Lee was followed by chapter about a woman who insinuated herself into the family of a famous murder victim, eventually taking over the role of speaking on behalf of the family and living in their home; a chapter about a woman who felt so compelled to advocate for a man she saw as being falsely convicted that she changed her entire life into fighting for his release, eventually even marrying him; and finally a look at a woman who contemplated murder herself. Monroe used each case study to examine the different ways women are fascinated by crime, from the readers of detective fiction to those who spend hours running down leads in abandoned unsolved crimes, to the dark corners of the internet where murderers have fan clubs.
Detective stories satisfy our desire for tidy solutions. They make the seductive promise that we can tame the chaos of crime by breaking it down into small, comprehensible pieces. They allow us to inhabit the role of the objective observer, someone who exists outside and above the scene of the crime, scrutinizing the horror as if it were a dollhouse.
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for these shadowy places; we'll discover things there that we can't learn anywhere else.A friend recommended this book to me when we discussed why we like crime novels so much. What is it about the darkest, more horrible things that one human can do to another that exerts such a draw on our imagination? Her answer was that we're all ghouls, but she also mentioned this book, when I wondered if it was more a way of explaining the inexplicable, of forming a pattern out of disorder. And I have to thank her for the recommendation. Savage Appetites goes deeper into this topic, one that is often raised and written about, and delivers, I think, some plausible answers, or at least a bit of clarity.
Monroe looks at four women, the first woman, Frances Lee, was born over a century ago. Denied the opportunity of a career or even higher education, she'd eventually throw her full efforts into funding a department of forensic science and then, as she saw herself valued only as a cheque-writer, she created a series of dioramas, intended to teach police officers how to look at crime scenes.
The chapter on Lee was followed by chapter about a woman who insinuated herself into the family of a famous murder victim, eventually taking over the role of speaking on behalf of the family and living in their home; a chapter about a woman who felt so compelled to advocate for a man she saw as being falsely convicted that she changed her entire life into fighting for his release, eventually even marrying him; and finally a look at a woman who contemplated murder herself. Monroe used each case study to examine the different ways women are fascinated by crime, from the readers of detective fiction to those who spend hours running down leads in abandoned unsolved crimes, to the dark corners of the internet where murderers have fan clubs.
Detective stories satisfy our desire for tidy solutions. They make the seductive promise that we can tame the chaos of crime by breaking it down into small, comprehensible pieces. They allow us to inhabit the role of the objective observer, someone who exists outside and above the scene of the crime, scrutinizing the horror as if it were a dollhouse.
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LibraryThing member rivkat
Tells stories of four women’s very different encounters with crime and its fascinations. An early self-taught/volunteer crime scene investigator/funder of forensic science; a victim’s rights advocate who glommed on to Sharon Tate’s family with what might be both sincerity and opportunism; a
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woman who fell in love with a man on death row for a crime he likely didn’t commit and who devoted her life to rescuing him; and a young woman who was an online Nazi and flew to Canada supposedly to carry out a mass murder with her online boyfriend, whose equally half-assed planning prevented any death but his own. Show Less
Language
Original publication date
2019-08-20
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