The Babysitter: my summer with a serial killer by Liza Rodman and Jennifer Jordan
Liza Rodman grew up in the 1960's and while her mother was a school teacher during the school year, in the summers her mother worked as a maid in a motel in Cape Cod near Provincetown. Rodman's mother was horrible and never seemed to want her children around. Once her shift was done at the motel she and her best friend would go out dancing and drinking leaving Liza and her sister Louisa with whoever was around. One of Liza's favorite babysitters was Tony Costa, the maintenance man at the same motel where her mother worked. Tony would let Liza and her sister ride with him to the dump and would stop to buy them ice cream or other treats on the way back to the motel. Tony seemed to enjoy being around kids - Liza, her sister, and their cousins. He would also sometimes take them out to the woods where he had a "secret garden" - this garden is where he grew pot, but also where he dumped the bodies of 5 women killed. Liza never knew Tony was a serial killer until she was an adult and started having nightmares about Tony. When she called her mom to ask if anything ever happened with Tony her mom said, "well, he turned out to be a serial killer." Liza became obsessed with the case and started researching Tony's past and his crimes. If it hadn't been the 1960's I don't think he would have gotten away for so long, but this was the time of hippies, drugs, and hitchhiking so it was easy to assume the missing women were just off partying somewhere - at least until the bodies turned up.
The book alternates between Liza's story of her childhood - which was AWFUL - and Tony's history and his crimes. Seriously, I think her mom was almost worse than the serial killer babysitter (he never harmed Liza or her sister). Tony had a pretty traumatic childhood as well, but it also seems like he was a sociopath from a pretty early age. He was also doing a LOT of drugs and it seemed like he was trying to self-medicate or suppress his violent tendencies. There is a lot of detail about Tony's past and his crimes so the authors were very thorough in their research. My only complaint was that the alternating chapters between Tony and Liza were really short and it made the story feel choppy. I wish the alternating parts had been a little longer so you got more of each story at one time. Definitely a chilling story and it says a lot about Liza's childhood that a serial killer was kinder to her than her own mother was. "'That's just the way it was back then,' she said recently, and chuckled softly, remembering her golden days on Cape Cod. 'Boy, oh boy, I sure had a good time. But then I remember I had two little kids and I wonder who the hell was looking after you girls.' Who indeed." (p. 301)
The book alternates between Liza's story of her childhood - which was AWFUL - and Tony's history and his crimes. Seriously, I think her mom was almost worse than the serial killer babysitter (he never harmed Liza or her sister). Tony had a pretty traumatic childhood as well, but it also seems like he was a sociopath from a pretty early age. He was also doing a LOT of drugs and it seemed like he was trying to self-medicate or suppress his violent tendencies. There is a lot of detail about Tony's past and his crimes so the authors were very thorough in their research. My only complaint was that the alternating chapters between Tony and Liza were really short and it made the story feel choppy. I wish the alternating parts had been a little longer so you got more of each story at one time. Definitely a chilling story and it says a lot about Liza's childhood that a serial killer was kinder to her than her own mother was. "'That's just the way it was back then,' she said recently, and chuckled softly, remembering her golden days on Cape Cod. 'Boy, oh boy, I sure had a good time. But then I remember I had two little kids and I wonder who the hell was looking after you girls.' Who indeed." (p. 301)
Becoming Bulletproof by Evy Poumpouras
I was familiar with Evy Poumpouras from the true crime docu-series The Disappearance of Maura Murray. So when I saw that she had written a book I wanted to check it out. Poumpouras has had an amazing career and was very driven from a young age. She started out applying for the NYPD and during the police academy she had the opportunity to apply for the United States Secret Service. The Secret Service only admits 1% of applicants (for comparison Harvard admits 6% of applicants), so the fact that she did get in and make it through the training says a lot about her. She went on to protect several US Presidents and their families all over the world. She also became a highly trained polygraph examiner for the Secret Service. So, in this book she shares many of the techniques she's learned in her time in the Secret Service about how to protect yourself and your family, how to read people, and influence situations. She gives both "real-world" examples and examples from her time in the NYPD and Secret Service. She is most definitely a badass and anyone could learn something from this book.
"One of the best strategies toward objectively fixing a problem is to use the Third-Person Soluntion. Take whatever dilemma you're facing and project it onto someone else. Perhaps a friend or family member. Now, look at the issue as if they're coming to you with it. What would you tell them? What guidance would you give? If you can avoid making it about you, you can begin to see it as a more simplified and less muddied version of the problem, and then begin making clearer decisions." (p. 75)
"Situational awareness is more important to your personal protection than learning how to handle yourself in a fight. If you're aware of your surroundings, odds are you won't need to fight. On the other hand, you can learn all the fancy self-defense moves and techniques and strategies out there, but if you don't see the problem coming, none of it matters. You will be blindsided when things go wrong, which means you won't have the chance to thwart the threat or get to safety." (p. 94)
"We all make mistakes. Some are small and some not so small, but the fact remains that they happen. We've all been taught that mistakes are terrible, a source of shame that will tarnish us forever. Frankly, that's true only if you don't take accountability for them. Here's the thing- many mistakes are inevitable and forgivable. Yet, no mistake is worse than failing to own up to it. It's a matter of character and integrity. There is truly nothing more inspiring than when people make an honest and thorough appraisal of a mistake and take full responsibility for their own errors or lapses in judgement...And remember that no one wants to follow anyone who shirks or cowers away from taking responsibility. We all fuck up. But how we recover from our fuckups is how we differentiate ourselves." (p. 261)
"One of the best strategies toward objectively fixing a problem is to use the Third-Person Soluntion. Take whatever dilemma you're facing and project it onto someone else. Perhaps a friend or family member. Now, look at the issue as if they're coming to you with it. What would you tell them? What guidance would you give? If you can avoid making it about you, you can begin to see it as a more simplified and less muddied version of the problem, and then begin making clearer decisions." (p. 75)
"Situational awareness is more important to your personal protection than learning how to handle yourself in a fight. If you're aware of your surroundings, odds are you won't need to fight. On the other hand, you can learn all the fancy self-defense moves and techniques and strategies out there, but if you don't see the problem coming, none of it matters. You will be blindsided when things go wrong, which means you won't have the chance to thwart the threat or get to safety." (p. 94)
"We all make mistakes. Some are small and some not so small, but the fact remains that they happen. We've all been taught that mistakes are terrible, a source of shame that will tarnish us forever. Frankly, that's true only if you don't take accountability for them. Here's the thing- many mistakes are inevitable and forgivable. Yet, no mistake is worse than failing to own up to it. It's a matter of character and integrity. There is truly nothing more inspiring than when people make an honest and thorough appraisal of a mistake and take full responsibility for their own errors or lapses in judgement...And remember that no one wants to follow anyone who shirks or cowers away from taking responsibility. We all fuck up. But how we recover from our fuckups is how we differentiate ourselves." (p. 261)
Confident Women: swindlers, grifters, and shapeshifters of the feminine persuasion by Tori Telfer
This is a compilation of stories about famous, or infamous, con women throughout history. The book is divided into sections of types of con women - the glitterati, the seers, the fabulists, and the drifters. Telfer is a good writer and storyteller. I'm not sure this book would have been as interesting if someone else had written it because it's just a collection of stories about con women. I think some of the ones earlier in history were women who weren't made for that time - too smart and driven for the prescribed roles of the day. But, most of the women profiled in this book are just awful people, plain old criminals and sociopaths. There are definitely some interesting stories and Telfer does a good job of telling their criminal tales.
True Story: what reality TV says about us by Danielle J. Lindemann
Also, as a side bar, if you don't hear Jon from Real World season 2 singing "true story" from the intro to the show when you read this title did you even live through the 90's?!
Some quotes I liked:
"Like our controlling images of poor and working-class people, or the racial stereotypes that have their roots in minstrelsy, our long-standing beliefs about women and men as 'naturally' different helps to justify the unequal roles we play in the home, the workplace, politics, and the economy." (p. 197)
"The presence of deviance doesn't mean that society is breaking down; it means its working correctly. For [Emile] Durkheim, deviance shores up our notions of what's normal and, in doing so, reinforces our social cohesiveness. Like townspeople in an old horror film chasing after a monster with their torches, we are bonded in our collective rejection of the ones who do not belong. This has always happened, Durkheim suggests, and will always happen. If fact, if we were a society of saints, we would simply redraw the boundaries of acceptability so that some of our members might still be cast as deviant." (p. 247)
"Even if the acceptability of these programs does vary, there's a reason people refer to the genre, writ large, as 'guilty pleasure' TV. We reserve that label for a particular range of cultural pursuits. We likely wouldn't call attending a Shakespearean play or reading Proust a 'guilty pleasure,' so why are we guilty about this?...aside from the occasional educational nugget, we don't 'get' anything from these programs. Yet professional sports don't have intellectual value either, and we don't regularly refer to them as 'guilty pleasures.'...unlike sports, it's a genre associated with more female viewership than male and we tend to devalue cultural products geared toward women (e.g., 'chick flicks,' 'chick lit')...There's a stink to reality TV that has never quite worn off, no matter how many people watch or how much the genre becomes a part of contemporary life. And maybe we're reticent to admit we watch these shows because we think their participants' behavior reflects on us - and maybe because we know that it does." (p. 251-53)
[On Donald Trump as reality TV star turned President of the United States] "As the communications theorist Dana Cloud points out, Trump's devotees took him 'seriously' but not 'literally': 'His language is keyed to produce a feeling rather than make a convincing argument....Part of being credible is resonating with the lives and struggles of one's audience.' Along similar lines, the media scholar Misha Kavka has pointed out that reality TV 'works at the level of feeling rather than cognitive content.'" (p. 260-61)
"Americans have long been concerned with the erosion of 'traditional' values, and one might expect reality TV's outrageous misfits to be at the leading edge of that erosion. But while conservative groups would be unlikely to endorse most of these shows, they've havens for some of the most old-fashioned values that pulse through contemporary American society. They show us how steadfastly we cling to conventional ideas about, for instance, families, marriages, sex, women's roles, Black bodies, and queer people. And here, too, reality TV and Donald Trump align. Both have relied on conservatism repackaged as outlandishness." (p. 262-63)
