Review of Ghettoside by Jill Leovy

There’s nothing like a book about murder to send 2015 out with a bang.

Los Angeles Times Journalist Jill Leovy chronicled every murder in that city over the course of a single year.  She wrote Ghettoside after noting that the media does not cover most of the deaths of young, African-American men and boys. And with that lack of attention comes the lack of resources to solve those crimes or to push them through the justice system.

In her book, Leovy focuses tightly on one particular crime – the seemingly random shooting of a detective’s son in a Los Angeles neighborhood with a particularly high murder rate. We get to know the victim and the victim’s family. We get to know the police division that serves this neighborhood and different detectives’ relationships with the community they serve. And specifically, Leovy introduces the lead detective on the case, and that detective is white. 

The case -- as Leovy reported it in the Los Angeles Times. The red dots represent other murders in the same area.

Ghettoside is a timely book, given our current grappling with relationships between the police and African-American communities across the country. This account is different than others, because it is not focusing on explicit police violence against citizens. We do, however, get to see how the police are still part of the story of “black on black violence,” the kind of violence that so rarely makes the news. Different police divisions do or do not receive priority funds to tackle these often difficult-to-solve cases. Different police officers do or do not come to know and care about the neighborhoods they serve. Different police officers do or do not believe that crimes against black men are as important as any other crimes.

Leovy comes to the conclusion that the problem that this neighborhood faces is that the American justice system does not really operate there. In the absence of a fair legal system, a different set of rules and a different logic of justice took root. The failure is not, she contends, a failure of individual morals or a consequence of poverty; rather, we as Americans have distributed justice, and the means to get there, unequally.

It is worthwhile to think about this book alongside two others that have addressed similar themes last year: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.  It would be interesting to discuss whether people think that it matters – or how it matters --  that the author is white or that the “hero” in the book is white. One thing that Leovy herself suggests is that race is never neutral.

I do think that Ghettoside is most devastating when Leovy simply lists murders. The names go on and on. The book could be reduced to a single essay with just those lists and make as much of an impact on me as this entire work of narrative nonfiction.

You can find a good interview with Leovy here.

Review of The Lake House by Kate Morton

I love Thanksgiving food. In the month preceding the holiday, my mouth begins to water at the very thought of our particular traditional dishes. And there’s a reason for that expectation – every dish is chock full of sugar and butter and cream. My cranberries? 2 full cups of sugar! My yams? Sugar and butter and then more sugar! I make a spinach gratin dish that involves butter and milk and cream and cheese! It’s a once-a-year system overload of the bad things that make food delicious.

Once I sank into my post-meal food coma, I also sank into The Lake House by Kate Morton. This book has been the darling of the blogging community, so I ignored the goofball cover and jumped in.

(The face on the cover of The Lake House reminded me of this type of 80s cover. Nice outfit, Dude!)

And you know what? This is a great book to read if you don’t want to work hard and if you want to be transported to a different time and place. It was full of literary sugar. Full of it! Brimming over, in fact, and then drizzled with butter and cream and more sugar.

The novel strikes me as a mashup of a cozy mystery and a gothic romance. There are several story lines running alongside each other, and the narrative jumps back and forth in time as the reader tries to figure out two separate mystery arcs. At the center of both is a detective named Sadie Sparrow, who is on leave from her job in 2003 after acting as a leak in an investigation. That investigation involves a woman who disappears and leaves her small child at home alone. The police department concludes that the woman vanished on her own terms; Sadie thinks foul play was involved.  On her break from work, she stays with her grandfather in the country. While there, she stumbles upon an abandoned estate that (miraculously) has been left exactly as it was in the 1930s. Sadie finds herself trying to solve the many decades old mystery of a baby who went missing at the house.

(Here's a creepy abandoned estate I stumbled upon in Ireland. I did not uncover any mysteries, unfortunately.)

If you like non-violent who-dunnits or books about crumbling mansions with hidden passageways and even more hidden secrets, this book is definitely for you. However, this is one of those novels where I had to constantly remind myself not to overthink things. There were so many convenient developments that pushed this plot along – e.g. a crime scene virtually untouched after 70 years and characters that helpfully write everything down in letters to be discovered later. I felt pulled away from the vibrant historical world each time Sadie got unrealistically lucky.

But I suppose you shouldn’t turn to a gothic romance-y mystery if what you’re looking for is realism. Morton gives the reader exactly what she promises, and for me, it was an entertaining holiday indulgence.

Review of The Restless Sleep by Stacy Horn

I read The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad as part of the Nonfiction November Readalong. The book allows the reader to follow detectives as they try to wrap-up four unrelated unsolved cases, which include the 1951 murder of a woman in her apartment (involving poop – GAH!), the murder of a couple involved in the drug trade (in front of their children – GAH!), the murder of a police officer (involving a meat hook to the eye – GAH!), and the murder of a kid (just GAH!). I read lots of crime fiction, but the sordid details of these real-life cases were difficult for me to handle.

My favorite parts of the book involved the discussion of the evolution of forensics (and how frustrating it can be to build a case without modern forensics). If you’re interested in learning how cadaver dogs become cadaver dogs, or how the process of DNA identification of old evidence happens (or doesn’t), there are some great details in here for you.

However, this is largely a story of bureaucracy – how the Cold Case Squad came into being and how it is being dismantled. The reader learns about office politics and financial politics and the complicated organizational webs that make “justice” a complex process. And with that, I felt a little empty handed by the conclusion of this book where we learn that there are not enough resources dedicated to old, low-profile cases, and, well, that’s the way it is.

The structure of this book reminded me a bit of The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths are Solving America’s Coldest Cases. That Book also had some great details about the process of solving missing/unidentified persons cases (by lay people!), but there were also large, very detailed parts of the book about the organization of internet communities that left me frustrated. Perhaps this frustration merely indicates is just my own curiosity lies in the cases themselves, not in the politics of crime fighting.

On a different note, It looks like this author’s most recent book is about singing (ha – a different note! Get it? I could have said that she changed her tune. Sorry. I’ll stop.). Here’s the Goodreads blurb about Imperfect Harmony: Singing Through Life’s Sharps and Flats:

Why do we sing? For Stacy Horn, singing in a community choir the Choral Society of Grace Church in New York is the one thing in her life that never fails to take her to a transcendent place and remind her that everything good is possible. She’s not particularly religious and (she’ll be the first to point out) her voice isn’t exactly the stuff of legend, but like thousands of other amateur chorus members throughout this country and the world, singing with other people makes her happy. As Horn relates her funny and profound experiences as a choir member, she treats us to an eclectic history of group singing and the music that moves us, whether we re hearing it for the first time or the hundredth; the dramatic stories of conductors and composers; and discoveries from the new science of singing, including the remarkable physical benefits of song.