Books by Rachel Monroe
Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession
A provocative and original investigation of our cultural fascination with crime, linking four archetypes—Detective, Victim, Defender, Killer—to four true stories about women driven by obsession.
In this illuminating exploration of women, violence, and obsession, Rachel Monroe interrogates the appeal of true crime through four narratives of fixation. In the 1940s, a frustrated heiress began creating dollhouse crime scenes depicting murders, suicides, and accidental deaths. Known as the “Mother of Forensic Science,” she revolutionized the field of what was then called legal medicine. In the aftermath of the Manson Family murders, a young woman moved into Sharon Tate’s guesthouse and, over the next two decades, entwined herself with the Tate family. In the mid-nineties, a landscape architect in Brooklyn fell in love with a convicted murderer, the supposed ringleader of the West Memphis Three, through an intense series of letters. After they married, she devoted her life to getting him freed from death row. And in 2015, a teenager deeply involved in the online fandom for the Columbine killers planned a mass shooting of her own.
Each woman, Monroe argues, represents and identifies with a particular archetype that provides an entryway into true crime. Through these four cases, she traces the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving role of victims, the Satanic Panic, the rise of online detectives, and the long shadow of the Columbine shooting. In a combination of personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the twentieth and twenty-first century, Savage Appetites scrupulously explores empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of violence.
Copies
No copies available.
The Future of Public Space: SOM Thinkers Series
by China Miéville, Jaron Lanier, Michelle Nijhuis, Rachel Monroe, Christopher DeWolf, Ben Davis, Sarah Fecht
Routine discussions on public space typically omit a gamut of possibilities ripe for critical discussion.
This book, the latest in the SOM Thinkers series, aims to address these questions. Here, Rachel Monroe challenges American preconceptions of the wild, wide-open West by addressing issues of surveillance; the series’ first fictional piece, by China Miéville, covers an under-examined area of public space under the guise of detective fiction; a study of public art by Ben Davis sheds light on the myths and stigmas that have accrued to public art, also asking what it can become; Christopher DeWolf shares a sensory navigation trip through a directionless Hong Kong; Michelle Nijhuis writes on the shifting ecologies of national parks; Sarah Fecht explores architecture and social life beyond Earth; while Jaron Lanier meditates on the idea of public space online, linking the prevailing, free-for-all model of the internet with a characteristically American yearning for freedom and repudiation of rules and structure. Also included are examples of public art works by Lawrence Weiner.
Copies
No copies available.
Savage Appetites True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession
A “necessary and brilliant” (NPR) exploration of our cultural fascination with true crime told through four “enthralling” (The New York Times Book Review) narratives of obsession.
In Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe links four criminal roles—Detective, Victim, Defender, and Killer—to four true stories about women driven by obsession. From a frustrated and brilliant heiress crafting crime-scene dollhouses to a young woman who became part of a Manson victim’s family, from a landscape architect in love with a convicted murderer to a Columbine fangirl who planned her own mass shooting, these women are alternately mesmerizing, horrifying, and sympathetic. A revealing study of women’s complicated relationship with true crime and the fear and desire it can inspire, together these stories provide a window into why many women are drawn to crime narratives—even as they also recoil from them.
Monroe uses these four cases to trace the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving role of victims, the Satanic Panic, the rise of online detectives, and the long shadow of the Columbine shooting. Combining personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the 20th and 21st centuries, Savage Appetites is a “corrective to the genre it interrogates” (The New Statesman), scrupulously exploring empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of crime.
Copies
No copies available.