Review: The Icepick Surgeon

 


I should start by saying that I have very complicated feelings about true crime, and they definitely colored how I read this book. As a genre, I find it to be frequently exploitative, disrespectful, and dismissive – in general, treating real-life atrocities as a source of entertainment. And this book definitely fell into that trap on occasion. Sure, stories about paleontologists trying to one-up each other are legitimately entertaining, but stories about eugenics, slavers, and Nazi scientists? Not so much. My girlfriend actually read a few pages of it and then said “I bet the author was white.” The worst example of this was a footnote that said something along the lines of “Everyone loves a Nazi villain,” which…the idea that Nazis are just bad guys with high entertainment value, not real-live people who murdered millions, is intensely uncomfortable to say the least. In other areas the author clearly took pains to clarify the awfulness of the people he wrote about, but even so, it was just unfortunate. It didn’t seem like all the chapters really belonged in the same book or deserved the same treatment. This was the main takeaway I had. The writing was fine and there were lots of interesting anecdotes and facts (I found the chapter about graverobbing and autopsies particularly interesting) but the cheerful true-crime attitude just got in the way of properly appreciating anything.

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