NYTimes Review: 'American Eve' by Paula Uruburu

Beauty and the Beasts

Ada Calhoun / New York Times

Insofar as the Gilded Age model Evelyn Nesbit — arguably the most famous face of the early 20th century — is remembered today, it’s as a tease and a gold digger. She has long been held vicariously responsible for the 1906 murder of the architect Stanford White, who was shot by Nesbit’s jealous husband during a performance at what was then Madison Square Garden.

In “American Eve,” Paula Uruburu, making magnificent use of Nesbit’s memoirs, letters and photographs (which introduce many of the chapters), places the notorious murder in a new context. Nesbit comes across as a naïve young girl manipulated by both the great architect and his millionaire assailant, both of whom happened to be sexual predators. The Gilded Age “It” girl, in other words, was far less Salome than Pauline (as in “The Perils of”).

In Uruburu’s telling, Nesbit had a bucolic childhood in Pennsylvania until her father’s sudden death, which plunged the family into penury. She, her mother and her brother bounced from one temporary home to another before a teenage Nesbit pulled the family out of debt by modeling and then acting. Her mother ostensibly tried to protect Evelyn from men but actually encouraged their attention for her own profit.

At 16, the virginal Nesbit fell in with White, the 46-year-old creator of wonders like the Garden and the Washington Square Arch. A married man but a well-known womanizer (or rather, girl-izer), White introduced Nesbit to high culture and fine food, lavished financial support on her family and invited her over for rides on his red velvet swing. (His obscure fetish was watching swinging girls kick at paper parasols.)

When the dreamy relationship turned into rape (inevitably, to the jaded observer), Nesbit felt shocked, betrayed and yet more beholden to White than ever. She later called him “a benevolent vampire” and described him as both “infinitely mean” and “generously big.” Until her death in 1967, she would say White was the only man she’d ever loved. But his attentions cooled when she reached the age of 17, and she was forced to look elsewhere for companionship.

After a dalliance with a frequently drunken John Barrymore, Nesbit wound up in the company of Harry K. Thaw. Thaw, a psychotic sadist whom Uruburu portrays as “a fraudulent Savonarola and deluded savior,” was determined to rescue Nesbit from Stanford White, who he believed had gotten him blackballed from some of New York’s elite men’s clubs.

Thaw, however, had all too much in common with his nemesis. Driven mad by Nesbit’s account of her past with White, Thaw (in a particularly gothic passage of the book) raped and beat her in a castle. But just as she had “easily and happily surrendered” to White after he raped her, like a “typical victim of abuse,” she began to think she was in the wrong and did not flee Thaw. Powerless, abandoned by her mother and still recovering from an appendectomy, Nesbit married her torturer. From that moment, his murder of her former lover feels inevitable.

Uruburu, who teaches English at Hofstra University, is a master of detail. When she’s describing, for example, the snow flurries, glowing Chinese lanterns and lead-painted penny whistles that greeted the start of 1900, the effect is magical. But at other times, her language veers from vivid to purple. Her figures of speech tend toward the florid (Victorianism in America “lingered like a ripe Anjou pear in Indian summer”). She also at times uses comically short phrases for dramatic effect (on Nesbit: “Vixen. Victim. The ur-Lolita.”), or more modifiers per sentence than are strictly necessary, as in: “A startlingly loud gunshot pierced the torpid night air.”

One other quibble: in depicting the way the young Nesbit appeared to White, Uruburu reports that the teenager was “tantalizingly pubescent,” of “delectable budding under-age appeal,” a “willing and uninhibited child-woman” plucked “at the sweetest moment of her development” like “the perfect Champagne grape.” White, Uruburu writes, would “pinch her smooth white shoulders, feeling, he said, for her wings.” It’s hard not to wish for a little more editing, something along the lines of “[ed note: blecch].”

Nonetheless, “American Eve” is a real page turner, especially the later sections, which deal with the murder and the sensational trials. (The first one ended in a hung jury; in the second, Thaw was acquitted by reason of insanity.) The highlight is one of Evelyn Nesbit’s all-too-few triumphs: her eagerly anticipated testimony on the stand. The cutthroat district attorney had planned to humiliate her, and pounded away on the subject of her morality. But it turned out that at least one good thing had come out of Nesbit’s misery: at the ripe old age of 22, she was well prepared when yet another man came along and tried to destroy her.

Ada Calhoun is the editor in chief of Babble.com, a blogger for AOL News and a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

NY Times Review: American Lightning

 Disaster Reel

From “American Lightning”

The aftermath of the explosion at the Los Angeles Times building, Oct. 1, 1910

By DAVID OSHINSKY

In the early-morning hours of Oct. 1, 1910, a huge explosion rocked the headquarters of The Los Angeles Times, killing 21 people and leaving the building in ruins. It soon became apparent that this was the work of a bomber, not the result of a match struck carelessly near leaking gas, and a national manhunt began. What followed — the arrests, the trial, the confessions — would grab headlines intermittently before sliding into the memory hole of history.

The more sensational press accounts from that era portrayed the bombing as “the crime of the century,” even though the century still had 90 years to run. Since that time, authors and headline writers have claimed this title for a host of other crimes (and trials) — think of Leopold and Loeb, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro boys, the Lindbergh baby kidnapper, Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, the Manson family, the Watergate crowd and O. J. Simpson. “American Lightning” is the latest entry in this bloated field, and Howard Blum, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, isn’t shy about stretching the relevance of his story. The 1910 bombing was a watershed event in our nation’s history, he insists, with dire consequences for the 20th century and a dark warning for the 21st.

Blum tells the story through the intersecting lives of three characters: Billy Burns, the detective who tracked down the bombers; Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who defended them; and D. W. Griffith, the filmmaker who had assisted the detective on an earlier murder case. Burns had built his career in the United States Secret Service, battling mobsters and corrupt politicians. By 1910, the year he formed his own detective agency, he was already a legend in the popular press, which called him “the American Sherlock Holmes.”With a knack for solving mysteries that baffled lesser men, Burns was hired by the mayor of Los Angeles to find the culprits.

The motive for the bombing seemed apparent from the start. The Los Angeles Times was a “fiercely conservative” newspaper, Blum says, and its publisher, an “unpleasant mountain of a man” named Harrison Gray Otis, had vowed to turn Los Angeles into “a bustling, nonunion metropolis.” Employing his army of detectives, Burns traced the conspiracy, as well as other terrorist acts, to the Indianapolis headquarters of the Structural Iron Workers union and its secretary-treasurer, John J. McNamara, whose accomplices included his brother Jim.

Business leaders praised Burns for saving capitalism from the clutches of ­working-class thuggery. Even former President Theodore Roosevelt, who had fought hard to break up big corporations, congratulated the detective for his “signal service” to the nation. But the union movement rushed to the McNamara brothers’ defense. “I have investigated the whole case,” said Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor. “Burns has lied!” Some went further, maintaining that the charges, if true, showed the desperation of working people in the face of capitalist greed: “Justifiable dynamiting,” the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens cried. With aid from the growing Socialist Party, organized labor raised the war chest needed to give the McNamara brothers the finest defense. Enter Clarence Darrow.

Blum spends more time on Darrow’s romantic failings than on his courtroom successes, though he does note that Darrow had previously defended labor leaders accused of violent acts. What made the Los Angeles case different, he adds, was the prosecution’s airtight case: the evidence against the McNamaras was overwhelming. So Darrow, attorney for the common man, seems to have taken part in a conspiracy to pay off a potential juror. (Charged with bribery after the trial, Darrow won himself an acquittal by delivering one of the more disingenuous summations of his career.) Meanwhile, Billy Burns was busily using the latest technology to illegally bug the jailhouse conversations of the defendants. In the end, the brothers pleaded guilty to murder in return for long sentences that spared their lives. Burns emerged as the hero, Darrow the beaten man. The blustering Harrison Gray Otis saw it all as further proof of organized labor’s villainy. Poor Samuel Gom­pers ran for cover, claiming to “have been cruelly deceived.”

And what of D. W. Griffith? In Blum’s hands he remains a transient figure, shoehorned into the story, one suspects, to tie the McNamara trial to the sexy culture of Hollywood. We learn a bit about Griffith’s moviemaking skills, his sympathy for the downtrodden and his influence on an awful two-reel film about the McNamara case, “A Martyr to His Cause,” which, Blum admits, had little “relation to reality.” But we also learn about Griffith’s weakness for teenage girls, especially the actress Mary Pickford, whose relationship with the filmmaker is described in turgid detail. (“D. W. . . . had left Mary seething with emotion. . . . His thoughts remained unarticulated, yet they were a torment. They pounded through his consciousness with the force of a compulsion.”)

“In the end,” Blum says, “the book I’ve written is more a narrative, an expansive and hopefully dramatic and resonating story about the past, than a historian’s narrow, fact-laden tome.” Fair enough. But the best stories are still the ones that go beyond the nuts-and-bolts narrative, no matter how dramatic, to explore larger meanings and ideas. Although Blum makes repeated claims for the importance of the Los Angeles Times bombing and casually compares it to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he adds no historical bedrock to support either assertion. What’s missing from the book is both a feeling for the pulse of every­day life in Los Angeles in 1910 and an understanding of the enormous industrial, technological and demographic changes that had ignited the violent impasse between labor and capital in California, and beyond.

For Americans a century ago, the bombing offered a brief whiff of Armageddon — a society on the brink. This alone makes it a memorable story, one that still begs to be told.

David Oshinsky holds the Jack S. Blanton chair in history at the University of Texas and is a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University.

Boston Globe Review: 'The Gardner Heist' by Ulrich Boser

Real-life whodunit remains a mystery

By Shelley Murphy

Globe Staff

Two men disguised as police officers conned their way into Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the early morning hours of March 18, 1990. They quickly subdued the guards, then swept through the treasure-laden rooms, ripping Rembrandts and a Vermeer from their frames and scooping up other masterpieces by Degas and Manet.

Nearly two decades later, the world's largest art heist remains unsolved. The identity of the thieves is a mystery, and so is the fate of the artwork, estimated to be worth $300 million to $500 million.

In "The Gardner Heist," author Ulrich Boser offers a tantalizing whodunit as he embarks on an exhaustive search for the stolen masterpieces that takes him from the back alleys of Boston to the cliffs of England and picturesque villages overlooking Galway Bay in Ireland.

Boser, who has written for The New York Times and The Washington Post, does not crack the case. But he provides a fascinating look into the theft through colorful interviews with criminals, con men, lawyers, FBI agents, detectives, art experts, and middlemen who claim they can produce the stolen artwork.

His journey begins in early 2005, when he travels to New York City to interview Harold Smith, a renowned art detective who has retrieved an impressive number of pilfered paintings worldwide and is determined to solve the Gardner theft. When the ailing detective dies weeks after the interview, Boser is handed his hefty Gardner file and is immediately consumed by it.

The list of suspects scrutinized by Boser seems endless and includes some of Boston's most notorious crime figures: fugitive gangster James "Whitey" Bulger, charged with 19 murders and one of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted; David A. Turner, once dubbed the South Shore's Teflon gangster and now serving a 38-year prison term for the 1999 attempted robbery of an armored car company vault; and Joseph Murray, a Charlestown drug smuggler and Irish Republican Army sympathizer shot to death by his wife in 1992.

One of the most startling revelations - which puts the artwork squarely in Bulger's hands - is disclosed for the first time by Boser, then later discounted as myth. Boser reveals that a reformed art fence he interviewed in an English seaside resort claimed that his business partner was working at an antiques fair in Coconut Grove, Fla., in the early 1990s when Bulger offered to sell him the Gardner loot for $10 million. But the business partner was willing to pay only $1 million and Bulger rejected that deal, according to the art fence.

Yet Boser later concedes that the reformed art fence also told him that when Bulger offered to sell the paintings, he was accompanied by Patrick Nee, a South Boston associate. He notes that it couldn't have happened that way because Nee was in prison at the time. And Nee insists it never happened at all.

Boser then shifts his focus to other suspects, finally fingering the imprisoned Turner as his personal prime suspect. He builds a case against Turner after tracking down an eyewitness who saw the robbers posing as police officers as they sat in a car outside the museum moments before their brazen break-in. That witness says Turner looks like one of the men he saw, but Turner emphatically denies any involvement.

There is no tidy ending to Boser's intriguing journey. To date, not one stolen Gardner treasure has been recovered. Gone are Rembrandt's "The Storm on the Sea of Galilee," "A Lady and Gentleman in Black," and a postage-stamp-size self-portrait; Johannes Vermeer's "The Concert"; Govaert Flinck's "Landscape With an Obelisk"; five sketches by Edgar Degas; and Edouard Manet's "Chez Tortoni."

Shelley Murphy is a member of the Globe staff.

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

Review of 'Gomorrah' by Roberto Saviano

Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples' Organized Crime System

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Saviano has created a perfectly realized, morally compelling journey through the brutal world of contemporary Italian mob life in this ceaselessly violent tale of the Camorra, a network of thugs, exploiters and killers who run Naples and the surrounding countryside. Armed with a police band radio, Saviano visits one crime scene after another, recording the final words and circumstances of the dying and dead. The murders described are savage, cruel and senseless: The head... hadn't been cut off with a hatchet, a clean blow, but with a metal grinder: the kind of circular saw welders use to polish soldering. The worst possible tool, and thus the most obvious choice. Jewiss's translation of Saviano's intense prose flows beautifully from the pestilence and degradation of everyday life in the teeming Neapolitan slums to the futile efforts of the police to control the rich, organic chaos that is the only way the Camorra know how to live. A stunning achievement, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the state of contemporary Europe. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Book Review: 'The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher' by Kate Summerscale

THE SUSPICIONS OF MR. WHICHER
A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective.
By Kate Summerscale.
Illustrated. 360 pp. Walker & Company. $24.95.

Marilyn Stasio/The New York Times

Fact and fiction do not so much blur as bleed into each other in “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher,” Kate Summerscale’s fastidious reconstruction and expansive analysis of the Road Hill murder case, which centered on an infamous crime that had all of England reeling in the summer of 1860. In the early morning of June 29, someone crept into the nursery of Road Hill House, Samuel and Mary Kent’s grand home in the village of Road, and stole off with their 3-year-old son, Saville. Only hours after the alarm was raised by the nursemaid, the child was discovered, his throat deeply cut and his dead body tossed down the servants’ outdoor privy. It was, Summerscale says, “perhaps the most disturbing murder of its time.”

Detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher, one of the eight original officers of Scotland Yard’s detective force, honored among his colleagues as “the prince of detectives,” was sent down from London to this heavily industrialized region in the south of England to bring some professionalism to the local investigation. But this was no open-and-shut case — there was no obvious motive for the murder of a child, there were no witnesses at all, and critical clues were lost or compromised — and therein lies its real significance. With no quick and easy resolution to the mystery, Whicher was forced to dig into the private affairs of the Kent household, unearthing secrets and advancing speculations that, in Summerscale’s view, were profoundly threatening to English society’s notions of itself. The case became “a kind of myth,” she says, “a dark fable about the Victorian family and the dangers of detection.”

Once lodged in the collective imagination, the murder drew comment not only from the hyperventilating press and outraged guardians of public safety and morality, but from literary lights of the day. Dickens proposed his own theory to his friend Wilkie Collins, and both made pointed use of the case in later novels. (For the true lit-hist-myst buff, to reread “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” or “The Moonstone” directly after “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher” is akin to having an epiphany.) Summerscale, formerly the literary editor of The Daily Telegraph, goes so far as to say that the real-life investigation “set the course of detective fiction.” Two years after the murder, her point was made by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, whose hugely popular novel “Lady Audley’s Secret” drew heavily on the particulars of the case to provide a blueprint for what came to be known as the sensation novel.

Taking her own literary cue, Summerscale smartly uses an energetic narrative voice and a suspenseful pace, among other novelistic devices, to make her factual material read with the urgency of a work of fiction. What she has constructed, specifically, is a traditional country-house mystery, more brutal than cozy, but presenting the same kind of intellectual puzzle as her fictional models and adorned, as such books once were, with wonderfully old-fashioned maps, diagrams, engravings, courtroom sketches and other illustrations. (Even the scholarly notes might be looked on as hidden clues, leading the reader to discover such gems as Richard D. Altick’s “Victorian Studies in Scarlet” and Thomas Boyle’s “Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead.”)

More important, Summerscale accomplishes what modern genre authors hardly bother to do anymore, which is to use a murder investigation as a portal to a wider world. When put in historical context, every aspect of this case tells us something about mid-Victorian society, from prevailing attitudes about women (“prone to insanity”), children (“full of savage whims and impulses,” according to one 19th-century physician) and servants (“outsiders who might be spies or seducers”) to the morality-based intellectual constructs that codified such views of human behavior.

But the spirit of scientific enlightenment was also flourishing in this industrialized period. People were already infatuated with police detectives (“a secular substitute for a prophet or a priest”) and morbidly curious about the advances in criminal psychology and forensic procedures. For a nation of armchair detectives, the prolonged and very public Scotland Yard investigation was like a teaching manual in the new forensic sciences. As Summerscale puts it, “The Road Hill case turned everyone detective.”

More good thinking is applied to the significance of Inspector Whicher’s failure to verify his strong suspicions about the killer’s identity and bring that person to trial. (It would take five years and a full confession to convict the murderer and vindicate Whicher, whose once lofty reputation was in shreds.) Like any novelist, Summerscale follows her storytelling instincts in making the detective the hero of her book. While her efforts to humanize his sketchy character are limited at best, she does far better at illustrating how he was fictionally transformed, both in the mysteries of his own day and in subsequent permutations of the genre.

More dramatic than Whicher’s personal fall from public grace was the disillusionment with Scotland Yard and its methods. As the police investigation dragged on, with more and more secrets in the Kent household being aired, even the most avid voyeur could see that criminal detection held hidden dangers. The mania that Wilkie Collins called “detective fever” suddenly shifted to “distaste for the working-class fellow who had meddled in middle-class affairs” and the fear that such troublemakers might eventually breach the sanctity of one’s own home and mess all over the drawing-room carpet, as W. H. Auden put it in his classic essay “The Guilty Vicarage.”

In life as in detective fiction, such fears are not unfounded, for as Summerscale points out, “the classic country-house murder is an assault on propriety, an aggressive exposure of base needs and desires.” Which is why the author’s startling final twist both vindicates her fallen hero and advances an “aggressive” attack on moral hypocrisy in his day and ours.


Marilyn Stasio writes the Crime column for the New York Times Book Review.