Go Down Together was bought immediately after I read and loved Jeff Guinn’s The Road to Jonestown, and was no disappointment. Prior to reading this, I knew the very basics about the pair – Depression era gangsters and snappy dressers, who went down together in a hail of bullets. After reading this, I feel I know the pair rather intimately – and was rather surprised to have some of the more popular myths about them demolished. Both hailing from incredibly poverty stricken backgrounds – the […]
Horrifying and heartbreaking in equal measure
Sometimes you come across a book that is so mind-blowingly good, you immediately go out and purchase every book ever written by the author. The Road to Jonestown was such a book. A huge, fat book that’s more than worth the effort, it tells you everything you ever wanted to know and more about the Reverend Jim Jones, his followers, just how he got hundreds of otherwise intelligent people to cede control of every aspect of their lives, and the sequence of events that led […]
How not to run a police department
Throughout the 80’s and 90’s, women were going missing at an alarming rate from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside area. But despite the best efforts of the women’s families, friends and others – like the community workers who came into contact with them – to report them missing, and despite warnings from experts within the law enforcement community that Vancouver had a serial killer problem, the Vancouver Police Department would choose to ignore that for nearly twenty years, often lying to concerned relatives about their missing loved-ones’ […]
When the author outshines her subject…
Usually the research leading to a book is a means to an end. But with this one, I feel like the book is the means, and the real story lies in the lead up to the book. We could talk about a man so evil he is believed to be responsible for more than 50 rapes and at least 12 homicides. A man who terrorized California for a decade…whose dauchebaggery was low enough to taunt a child, saying he was playing with mommy and daddy. […]