Why am I passionate about this?
I’ve always liked narrative history and how we can take research and turn it into a story. More importantly, I love books that can recover the histories of marginalized people—people who don’t make it into the history textbooks. Historical true crime gives me access to realities we don’t often see. Court transcripts, detective reports, news accounts, and oral histories all combine to illuminate a world beyond the famous and known. I’m drawn to those books (and book projects) that ask the question: what can we know about the past if we look at it through the lens of a crime? Whose realities do we witness through such a lens?
James' book list on crime that reshapes our understanding of the past
Why did James love this book?
What I love about this book is that it is not another investigation into the mysterious (and now mythologized) Jack the Ripper in late Victorian London. Rather, the book is about his victims.
In rendering each woman’s life within the harsh realities of working-class East London, Rubenhold completely shifts the way I have come to understand the entrenched claims that Ripper’s victims were all prostitutes. I love the research and speculation the book offers into the lives of the five women, recovering their complexities and difficulties among the squalor of Whitechapel. It’s a compelling read that held me from start to finish.
13 authors picked The Five as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2019
'An angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth. Powerful and shaming' GUARDIAN
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.
Their murderer was never identified, but…