Harvey Rosenfeld – Depravity: A Narrative of 16 Serial Killers (2009)
Their crimes span the globe but one thing unites them: they are sixteen of the twentieth century’s most notorious serial killers. In this well-researched volume, find out their motives and what made them tick. Walk the path of investigators who broke cases and listen to the words spoken from the killers mouth.
All of them made their communities tremble in fear. They include:
● Johann Otto Hoch, who moved to America from Germany in the 1890s and married a string of women. Instead of being the man of their dreams, he became their worst nightmare.
● Fritz Haarmann, “The Vampire of Hanover,” killed dozens of young male vagrants and prostitutes from 1919 to 1924 in Germany.
● Bla Kiss, a Hungarian serial killer, killed young women and tried pickling them in giant metal drums.
● Robert Hansen, who began killing prostitutes in Alaska around 1980. He’d let them flee in the wilderness before hunting them down with a knife and rifle.
Learn about these and other serial killers. Find out what motivated them to lead such horrible lives and how they were finally brought to justice in “Depravity: A Narrative of 16 Serial Killers.”
Verdict: 2/5
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Great Britain in the 1970s appeared to be in terminal decline—ungovernable, an economic train wreck, and rapidly headed for global irrelevance. Three decades later, it is the richest and most influential country in Europe, and Margaret Thatcher is the reason. The preternaturally determined Thatcher rose from nothing, seized control of Britain’s Conservative party, and took a sledgehammer to the nation’s postwar socialist consensus. She proved that socialism could be reversed, inspiring a global free-market revolution. Simultaneously exploiting every politically useful aspect of her femininity and defying every conventional expectation of women in power, Thatcher crushed her enemies with a calculated ruthlessness that stunned the British public and without doubt caused immense collateral damage.Ultimately, however, Claire Berlinski agrees with Thatcher: There was no alternative. Berlinski explains what Thatcher did, why it matters, and how she got away with it in this vivid and immensely readable portrait of one of the towering figures of the twentieth century.
Verdict: 4/5
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