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A review by posies23
Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard of by Harold Schechter
4.0
I went through a phase a few years back where I read a bunch of Schechter's true crime books.
The one thing I learned (aside from how terrible some human beings can be) is that Schechter does strong research, and does a nice job of distilling the various, sometime contradictory information about his subjects into a sensible, and linear explanation.
That's the real strength of PSYCHO USA, which tells the story of several American killers who were famous for a time, but have largely been forgotten by the modern public. (It also explains the paradoxical subtitle.) Spanning America's history, Schechter looks at the lives (and deaths) of these notorious folks, quoting from primary sources and filling in the gaps as best he can.
I couldn't help thinking that several of the chapters could have been fleshed out a bit more, but overall, it was a very interesting read and covered a lot of ground that hasn't really been covered before.
Parts of it are gruesome, of course, and there's a lot of disturbing content -- it is a novel about killers, after all -- but if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, I'd say it's really worth reading.
The one thing I learned (aside from how terrible some human beings can be) is that Schechter does strong research, and does a nice job of distilling the various, sometime contradictory information about his subjects into a sensible, and linear explanation.
That's the real strength of PSYCHO USA, which tells the story of several American killers who were famous for a time, but have largely been forgotten by the modern public. (It also explains the paradoxical subtitle.) Spanning America's history, Schechter looks at the lives (and deaths) of these notorious folks, quoting from primary sources and filling in the gaps as best he can.
I couldn't help thinking that several of the chapters could have been fleshed out a bit more, but overall, it was a very interesting read and covered a lot of ground that hasn't really been covered before.
Parts of it are gruesome, of course, and there's a lot of disturbing content -- it is a novel about killers, after all -- but if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, I'd say it's really worth reading.