Great book | Fiend: The Shocking True Story Of Americas Youngest Serial Killer

book review | Fiend: The Shocking True Story Of Americas Youngest Serial Killer | Harold Schechter

books:


	• Fiend: The Shocking True Story Of Americas Youngest Serial Killer Harold Schechter Pocket, 2000 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 28 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

books like this are the reason we read true crime

This book stands out as one of the best. The well respected author received excellent professional reviews. If a book like this did not come along every so often I would give up on the genre. The pages bring the characters, setting and time period to life.

Great book

The book was great and in perfect condition. I received it pretty quick too. I would order here again.

book review

This was an interesting book about a very sick boy. It gets very slow and lengthy during the trial phase in the story, but it's an interesting read and I suggest it to those like me, that like reading about serial killers.

for more information click here

Brilliant. Highly Recommended.

I found this book both chilling and interesting. I will start by saying that I would not recommend this to people who have a weak stomach, as some of the crimes are described in gruesome detail. There were times when even I had to put the book down for a time and return to it later. It is interesting that, despite people's complaints about violence in today's youth, America's youngest serial killer appeared in the nineteenth century. I was amused to note that the furore about the negative influence of the media is by no means a modern phenomenon. These days, it is violent movies and video games. Back then it was the Penny Papers. If there is any lesson we can take from this book it is this: that, while the media may expand a persons repertoire of possible methods, the innate ability and desire to commit terrible acts upon their fellow human beings must already be there.

for more information click here

Not his best, but still interesting ....

Jesse Pomeroy's tale is intriguing and fascinating. The details of his bizarre life unfold like fiction--but it is all real.

A young ruffian, turned bully torturer, turned America's youngest serial killer, Pomeroy's life is a fascinating look at how "evil" evolves. It is at a break neck speed that Jesse becomes fiend, then killer. But this is what also makes this book weaker in my opinion. Schechter devotes the same amount of detail and passion to the odd tidbits, contemporary histories, and aftermath of such horrific events. But in poor Jesse's case the aftermath was more than the crimes.

Being so young with so little to report (although the horrific details are not made any less difficult because of quantity), Schechter spends the majority of his pages devoted to the trial, public opinion, and Jesse's justice. The balance of Bestial or Fatal was missing from Fiend. I found that disappointing.

But regardless, it was an interesting case to explore, and Schechter is still such a great, comprehensive writer.

My favorite parts of the book is when we veer from Jesse to other contemporary cases ... just enough to peak our interest in a new detail, but then right back to the story at hand and how the two relate to one another.

A good book, not great, by a gifted author that I definitely recommend. But just don't expect Bestial (my personal favorite).

for more information click here

A MONSTER PREYED UPON THE CHILDREN OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY BOSTON. HIS CRIMES WERE APPALLING -- AND YET HE WAS LITTLE MORE THAN A CHILD HIMSELF.

When fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy was arrested in 1874, a nightmarish reign of terror over an unsuspecting city came to an end. "The Boston Boy Fiend" was imprisoned at last. But the complex questions sparked by his ghastly crime spree -- the hows and whys of vicious juvenile crime -- were as relevant in the so-called Age of Innocence as they are today.

Jesse Pomeroy was outwardly repellent in appearance, with a gruesome "dead" eye; inside, he was deformed beyond imagining. A sexual sadist of disturbing precocity, he satisfied his atrocious appetites by abducting and torturing his child victims. But soon, the teenager's bloodlust gave way to another obsession: murder.

Harold Schechter, whose true-crime masterpieces are "well-documented nightmares for anyone who dares to look" (Peoria Journal Star), brings his acclaimed mix of page-turning storytelling, brilliant insight, and fascinating historical documentation to Fiend -- an unforgettable account from the annals of American crime.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

hot