Review of "The Wilderness of Ruin: A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America's Youngest Serial Killer" on 'Goodreads'
1 star
2.0 i guess?
The problem with this book is that there is not enough of a premise to support a book. The "hunt" for the boy torturer could probably fill a magazine feature (though to be worth reading, it would need to be better written than the material here), but it's not enough to fill a book. To take up the rest of the pages, the author tries, unconvincingly, to tie Jesse Pomeroy's story in with some information about what Oliver Wendall Holmes and Herman Melville were up to at around the same time. But it just doesn't work. These things aren't connected, no matter how much the writer tries to convince us that they are. I ended up frustrated by how loose the book was.
I think the writer was trying to emulate Devil in the White City, which is one of my favorite nonfiction books and probably my …
2.0 i guess?
The problem with this book is that there is not enough of a premise to support a book. The "hunt" for the boy torturer could probably fill a magazine feature (though to be worth reading, it would need to be better written than the material here), but it's not enough to fill a book. To take up the rest of the pages, the author tries, unconvincingly, to tie Jesse Pomeroy's story in with some information about what Oliver Wendall Holmes and Herman Melville were up to at around the same time. But it just doesn't work. These things aren't connected, no matter how much the writer tries to convince us that they are. I ended up frustrated by how loose the book was.
I think the writer was trying to emulate Devil in the White City, which is one of my favorite nonfiction books and probably my favorite true crime book. But through writing skills, exhaustive research, and a much tighter focus (on the creation of the Chicago World's Fair and H.H. Holmes), that book managed to be truly great. This one falls...far short of that. Not worth the read, imo, no matter how into true crime you are.
