On Halloween people are willing to be scared for a day, but I scare the crap out of myself nearly every day … By opening a book. I’ve seen a lot of men die, in strange ways, gross ways, I-never-saw-that-coming ways and super-sad, that-guy-didn’t-deserve-to-die ways.

The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 killed three percent of the world’s population: 50 million people. With death lurking just around the next paragraph, one can get jumpy, and it can have you steering clear of certain places and circumstances that, if you believe what’s written in books, may disproportionately lead to an abrupt demise. Traveling on a boat seems to be unreasonably dangerous. The Lusitania had 1,959 passengers on board when a German U-boat decided to take aim at a nonmilitary target (it was 1915). Almost 1,200 passengers perished (600 were never found). U-boats also sank the destroyer Reuben James (1941) near Iceland, killing 115 seamen. OK, I get it, in times of war, ocean travel is dicey. So I give you the Titanic. The Titanic ended up being not too safe, especially if you were poor. Only four out of thirty-one first-class passengers on the Titanic died, but eighty-one out of 179 third-class passengers perished. Then we have the Essex. If your boat gets attacked by an angry sperm whale, then I’m sorry, you’re just not supposed to be on a boat. The beast that sank the Essex in 1820 was a male eighty-five feet long, weighing eighty tons, with a tail twenty feet wide. When the Essex sank it was literally as far away from land as any spot on the earth.

Dryland is fraught with its own perils. The 1871 Chicago fire started in a hay barn (just ask Mrs. O’Leary); it destroyed thousands of buildings as well as seventy miles of streets, and claimed 300 lives. You don’t expect farm animals to start fires, but life’s unpredictable, and a small spark can torch a neighborhood or motivate your neighbor to go fetch his shotgun. Depending on what you consider “feud related,” between twelve and twenty-four people died in the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys. Bad Jim Vance shot Harmon McCoy in January 1865 to start the feud. I’m pretty sure there was a pig involved, and I know how chapped I get when someone tries to deprive me of pork. Yep, anger can be a killer. The so-called Haymarket Riot in 1886 had anarchists rioting in Chicago in support of striking workers. In the end, eight policemen wound up dead and the authorities turned around and hanged four of the rioters. Dying for something you believe in brings an association of valor, but the pages of history are mostly inked by meaningless death that is far from righteous. When Captain James Cook arrived in Hawaii in the 1700s the population was about 300,000. In a short time, the white man’s disease would cut that population by seventy-five percent.

The July 1916 attack of Charles Vansant was the first time “shark bite” was listed as an official cause of death in the U.S. So what can this teach us? That even if reading is a minefield of data points about death and dying, the only truly safe place to swim is in a sea of facts.

♦

Four Damn Good Books—Freaky Killing

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
I found this book by accident, as it was mentioned in another book that referred to it as “a first of its kind.” It is riveting and expertly written. It’s 1959 in a small Kansas town. One of the community’s most respected families turns up dead—mother, father, daughter, son, brutally killed, a shotgun blast to the head of each one. Maybe there’s money involved, maybe reality is more complex than meets the eye, maybe pure evil has visited the plains. The blend of a nuanced telling (in all its grisly details) and a moving account of life in an America of the distant past result in a memorable page-turner.

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, by Anse Seierstad
Wow. Heart-wrenching. Sad. Scary. I knew nothing of this story and virtually nothing of Norway except a general idea of the space it occupies on a map. The Norwegian Chamber of Commerce is likely bummed that, for many, this event serves as an introduction to their country. In July 2011 a twenty-something named Anders came unhinged, killing eight people with a bomb in central Oslo, then moving to a remote wooded island where Norwegian youths were having a retreat. When he arrived there he killed, executed 59 more people, mostly teenagers. The story is wonderfully and suspensefully told and while it is not reasonable to prevent lone lunatics from committing this kind of crime, Norwegian authorities look woefully inept, completely unprepared and super-naive about anything bad happening in their storybook country. A monumental waste of too many youthful dreams.

The Mob and the City: The Hidden History of How the Mafia Captured New York, by C. Alexander Hortis
The Feds and the FBI essentially denied the existence of organized crime until the so-called Apalachin meeting in New Jersey on November 14, 1957. The meeting that brought together at least 60 Sicilians, the leaders of New York’s crime “families,” (and made it impossible for the government to deny knowledge of the mob) was called by Vito Genovese in essence to name a successor to Albert Anastasio (the Lord High Executioner of Murder Inc.). First-rate history of the mafia in New York City. A well-written myth buster. I have not seen a clearer picture about how the Five Families came into existence, the roles they played and the business model that sustained them—and it could only have happened in NYC. East 107th Street in Harlem was considered the unofficial headquarters of the Mafia. All the facts, complete with what’s missing in similar books, namely, pictures, maps, tables and names.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, by Erik Larson
It’s the 1893 World’s Fair, what they called the World’s Columbian Exposition. A coming-out party for the city of Chicago. The midway skyline was dominated by a 250-foot, first-of-its-kind Ferris wheel, designed for the fair by inventor George Ferris. Fully loaded, it could carry 2,160 people. The fair is a wonder with new inventions and new possibilities in every building and around every turn.  The White City, dubbed such because of its new electric illumination and all-white architecture, was said to have inspired the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. A nut job takes this as an opportunity to kill (some say as many as 200 people) and he sets up a kind of boarding house for this sole purpose, replete with a crematory to get rid of the evidence. Larson has become a master of this flavor of tiered storytelling, blending historical moments and places with a darker, simultaneous subplot.