Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for this eARC.

"Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning" by Sarah Weinman is a compelling anthology that delves into the true crime genre with a refreshing perspective. The book, which features a foreword by Rabia Chaudry, is a collection of essays from fourteen innovative crime writers who explore cases that offer deep insights into societal issues.

Weinman, known for her award-winning editing of "Unspeakable Acts" , curates a selection of narratives that challenge the traditional true crime arc of crime and punishment. Instead, these stories highlight the often-overlooked narratives and the systemic harms and inequalities that lead to crime. For instance, Wesley Lowery's piece on a decades-old unsolved lynching and Justine van der Leun's report on women imprisoned for self-defense against abuse are powerful examples of the anthology's depth.

This book is an examination of justice and its various forms. It questions the role of true crime as entertainment and its potential as a catalyst for social change. The writers combine gripping storytelling with sharp cultural analysis, urging readers to reconsider what justice should look like in America.

"Evidence of Things Seen" introduces what could be considered the new classics of true crime. It's a must-read for anyone interested in the genre, not just for the thrill of the mystery, but for a deeper understanding of the complexities of crime and its implications on society. With its July 4, 2023 release, the book stands as a testament to the evolving landscape of true crime literature, one that seeks to enlighten as much as it entertains.

The essays in this collection were varied in how much I enjoyed them, but there were a lot of writers and topics that I may not have sought out on my own that I very much enjoyed. Some highlights were the essay on the Atlanta spa shootings targeting Asian women, Amanda Knox's essay on owning the rights to her own story, and the true crime Facebook groups and how they went after someone posing as a victim.

Heartbreaking and and informative at the same time. The editor did a fantastic job with how they structured the order of the articles.

Evidence of Things Seen goes beyond the usual true crime book and covers deeper systemic issues of crime and the criminal justice system and how the true crime cases we love to hear are reported. I really enjoyed the insight provided by the essays in this collection. I will definitely check out more of Sarah Weinman's work.

I really enjoyed reading this collection. By enjoyed, I mean I learned a lot and was forced to think about my role in the exploitation of victims in the true crime space. As a cis white woman, I can be blind to the injustices faced by women of color, transgender women, and immigrants.

Thank you to Netgalley for an ARC of this book!

Poignant Essays of the COVID-era.

Evidence of Things Seen is a collection of feature articles showcasing difficult stigmas from the modern era. These 14 samples are compiled into three categories: What We Reckon With, The True Crime Stories We Tell, and Shards of Justice.

The first section covers the disheartening truth behind the racial and gender divides when a crime is committed. From a 34-year-old cold case collecting dust in a racist community to the alarming number of women incarcerated for self-defense and biased media coverage of the all-too recent Atlanta Spa Shootings- the book opens no-holds barred.

The second section asks us to consume our news critically, while also highlighting the pros and cons of 'couch sleuthing'. It opens with Amanda Knox discussing her unwanted infamy, and gives us some examples of internet detective work at its finest.

Finally, the book concludes with essays regarding life after a life sentence. Trying to make amends in a prison system built from brutality.

Evidence of Things Seen is the kind of book you are going to want to read, reread, highlight and discuss. Perfect for book clubs, college classes, and advocates of the human condition. Be mindful, however, that it may take some time to digest, making the short story format ideal. I especially appreciated the book in audio. While the narrator's inflection felt overly glum at times, I was able to listen with rapt attention at 1.5x speed. This kept me from getting hung up on words and pronunciations that may have been otherwise distracting.

I might even go so far as to call this essential modern reading.

[Thank you to NetGalley and Ecco for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.]

A very good, thought provoking collection of true crime/true crime adjacent articles. This is the second book by Sarah Weinman that I have read and I think she's hit my "must buy" list of authors. I really enjoy the perspective she finds.

Basically the articles republished in this book want to upend all the clear-cut narrative arcs (as given in the pitch for the book too) of ‘victim wronged’, ‘police in pursuit’, ‘suspect apprehended’ and ‘justice delivered.’ The stories that resonated with me were those of the victims of Atlanta Spa shootings, the missing Native American women of California and the story of Dhawan family. Memorable Quotes from each article are reproduced below:

‘True crime cannot be divorced from society because crime is a permanent reflection and culmination of what ails society’ - Sarah Weinman

‘From scripture to Shakespeare, there is no great epic without crime at the heart of it’. - rabia chaudry (true crime podcast serial, ‘undisclosed’, HBO series and book). Her younger brother’s best friend is Adnan Syed, who was convicted of Hae Min Lee in 1999, then set free decades later) She believes ‘true crime podcast is a powerful advocacy tool to bring us stories that have ability to change hearts minds and systems’.

Our true crime obsession is bad for society. - Laura Bogart


PART 1: WHAT WE RECKON WITH:

- A Brutal Lynching. An Indifferent Police Force. A 34-Year Wait for Justice by Wesley Lowery.
Originally published in GQ, July 2020

23 year old Timothy Coggins of rural community in Spalding, Atlanta stabbed, tortured and killed in 1983 by Frankie Gebhardt (and murder ‘watched’ on by) Bill Moore Sr., white brothers-in-law who lived in the trailer park near where Coggins’s body was found.

- The Short Life of Toyin Salau and a Legacy Still at Work by Samantha Schuyler. Originally published on Jezebel, August 2020

19 year old Oluwatoyin Sala killed by Aaron Glee

‘: They forced the public and police to pay attention, to prevent their friend from becoming a statistic. Without (young Black women who agitated about Toyin’s disappearance) Toyin’s name could have been swept to the side, like any of the 64,000 or more Black women and girls who are currently missing in the United States, a statistic only exacerbated by the well-documented disparity that Black women’s disappearances are often erased by police and in the press—what Gwen Ifill once nicknamed “Missing White Woman Syndrome.”

Toyin had been out of touch for almost a day when she posted on Twitter that she had been assaulted. “I was molested in Tallahassee, Florida by a Black man this morning at 5:30 on Richview and Park Ave,” she wrote. A man had given her a ride to get her things from New Life Methodist. After bringing her to his home, he had exposed himself to her while she showered. He offered to give her a massage, and she wrote that when he did, she froze. He was naked. When he fell asleep, she left and called the police, which TPD later confirmed. She tweeted a description of the man, his car, and his house. “I will not be silent,” she wrote. “Literally wearing this man’s clothes DNA all over me.”

- “No Choice but to Do It”: Why Women Go to Prison by Justine van der Leun. Originally published in the New Republic, in partnership with the Appeal, December 2020

Kevin Amos 19 killed by girlfriend Tanisha William’s roommate drug dealer Patrick Martin

‘Women’s prisons are populated not only by abuse and assault survivors, but by people who are incarcerated for their acts of survival. About 230,000 women and girls are incarcerated, an increase of more than 700% since 1980. (versus more than two million imprisoned men). (My findings suggest) conservatively, more than 4,400 women and girls are serving lengthy sentences for acts of survival.

The court appointed William White, a private attorney with a county contract, as Tanisha’s defender. According to a letter that White later wrote to the judge, he was constrained by a “$1,000 cap” on his legal work for Tanisha. He billed for 36.5 hours, which means that, unless he was granted a fee extension, he was paid $27.40 per hour—a rate that diminished the more he worked. A homicide case, according to Moran, of the Michigan Innocence Clinic, “is the legal equivalent of performing brain

(A 2008 National Legal Aid & Defender Association report on Michigan’s indigent defense systems reported that) the fixed-rate system created “a conflict of interests between a lawyer’s ethical duty to competently defend each and every client and her financial self-interests that require her to invest the least amount of time possible in each case to maximize profit,” according to the report.


- The Golden Age of White-Collar Crime by Michael Hobbes. Originally published in HuffPost Highline, February 2020.

With few exceptions, the only rich people America prosecutes anymore are those who victimize their fellow elites. Pharma frat boy Martin Shkreli, to pick just one example, wasn’t prosecuted for hiking the price of a drug used to treat HIV from $13.50 to $750 per pill. He went to prison for scamming investors in a hedge fund scheme years before. Meanwhile, in 2016, the CEO whose company experienced the deadliest mining disaster since 1970 served less than one year in prison and paid a fine of 1.4% of his salary and stock bonuses from the previous year. Why? Because overseeing a company that ignores warnings and causes the deaths of workers, even 29 of them, is a misdemeanor.

- Picturesque California Conceals a Crisis of Missing Indigenous Women by Brandi Morin. Originally published in National Geographic, March 2022

The National Information Crime Center, a federal agency, has documented more than 5,000 cases of missing Indigenous women. Experts say the real number is likely higher. Eighty-four percent of Indigenous women experience some form of violence during their lifetimes while those living on reservations are killed at 10 times the national murder rate.

“A lot of times the places they go missing from are extremely rural,” Lucchesi says. “There’s a lack of services, a lack of transportation, and a lack of opportunity.”

That’s especially true in California. The state as a whole has the highest Native American population in the United States—more than 750,000 people belonging to nearly 200 tribes, many of them living in the sprawling metropolises of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Yet those urban areas appear to be far less dangerous for Indigenous women than rural northern California, with its soaring redwood forests and rugged shoreline. There, at least 107 women have been murdered or gone missing since 1900, twice the number as in the Bay Area, where the Indigenous population is three times the size.


- How the Atlanta Spa Shootings—the Victims, the Survivors—Tell the Story of America by May Jeong. Originally published in Vanity Fair, March 2022.
Shootings at 3 parlors, Young’s Asian Massage Parlor, Gold Parlor and Aromatherpay Parlor, for which a client / customer Mario González was arrested, the eventual arrested suspect is not named, while names and stories of all of the Asian workers who died are given.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, known as Hart-Celler, ended the quota-based immigration system and specifically encouraged immigration from Asia and Africa. The Asian population in America grew from 63,000 people in 1870 to 12 million in 2000, and that number has nearly doubled since. They came to America as members of educated professional classes who, in the new country, became Gujarati hotel operators, Korean shopkeepers, Vietnamese nail salon owners, and Hmong chicken farmers.

(Spa Work) is as common in immigrant communities as it is misunderstood. According to Georgia state human-trafficking awareness training, people with limited English skills living at their place of work is considered a sign of sex trafficking, yet these are standard practices among workers. The work itself might mean ordinary massages, or it might mean massages that include erotic services—specifically manual stimulation, which some workers do not think of as sex work, as it doesn’t involve penetration.

Workers like Kim can make as much as $20,000 in a good month. That money supports families in this country and the other. Whatever remains is spent by visiting “room salons” or “host bars,” part of a larger world of night culture that originated in Japan and became popular across Asia and in diaspora communities called mizu shobai, the “water trade,” where hosts and hostesses lit cigarettes, poured drinks, and provided sexualized company while encouraging patrons to spend more, for which they received a cut. Host bars traditionally catered to men looking for female companions, but in recent times, bars catering to female customers have sprung up, which spa workers often patronized. Money also flows into private gambling dens, where workers get together to play Go-Stop, a Korean card game, or participate in kye, a kind of kitty, meaning “bond,” the informal lending system used by many immigrants with no access to official banking systems. Kye has been crucial to newcomers who are locked out of traditional labor markets due to a lack of language skills or discriminatory practices, and wish to start their own businesses. Ivan Light of UCLA estimated that as much as 40 percent of Korean-owned businesses in Los Angeles have been financed via kye, which has a social as much as an economic function, and together with the water trade is among the few ways people like Kim had of staving off the incurable loneliness that is central to immigrant life.

On the other side of Atlanta, 16 miles due east, is Stone Mountain, then as now a Native American holy site. In 1945, Ku Klux Klan members climbed it to carve out a cross, stretching 300 feet across the mountain face. The men lit it on fire, a Pharos visible 60 miles away, according to historian Kevin M. Kruse in White Flight.

Upon this sacred stone face, sculptor and KKK sympathizer Gutzon Borglum had begun exerting his will—a bas-relief of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson—but left before finishing, moving on to his opus, Mount Rushmore. Stone Mountain is “the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world,” as Richard Rose of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has said. Stone Mountain is also among the most visited sites in the state. On any given weekend, families host cookouts, play mini golf, and line up blithely for leisure activities against the backdrop of the three horsemen.

Daoqun considered traveling to the United States, but his children dissuaded him from making the perilous and costly journey. The family considered repatriating (Daoyou) Feng’s body back to China, but according to an ancient local tradition, unmarried daughters who die away from home cannot be buried in their ancestral village.

On April 4, after her body lay unclaimed in the county morgue for 19 days, Feng was at last interred. Her funeral was attended by sympathetic strangers, no friends or colleagues, many of whom were asylum seekers or of otherwise precarious immigration status.

On the same day, Daoqun’s wife rose at 4 a.m. to pluck the chickens before the family headed to sweep their ancestral tomb. Arriving at the grave site, they cleaned it of wild growth and lit their ghost money on fire. Others whispered prayers to the long list of spirits who had come before—a list that now included Feng—but Daoqun did not. “I never believed the dead could listen to the living.”

Chinese laborers in the South were among the earliest Asians to migrate to the U.S. from the mid to late 19th century. Anxious white plantation owners hired them during Reconstruction. The first Chinese in Georgia came as contract laborers in 1873, when an Indianapolis construction company brought in 200 Chinese workers to help build the Augusta Canal. Although Chinese labor completed much of the public infrastructure work in Georgia at this time, including railroads and bridges, according to Emory University history professor Chris Suh, the Chinese population was scrubbed from history, subsumed into the Black-white binary of the American South.

These immigrants aided in the “economic transition from raw extraction to something approaching industrial capitalism,” as Alexander Saxton writes in The Indispensable Enemy, but were reduced to their basic economic function—treated later as “high-tech coolies,” says Mount Holyoke College associate professor Iyko Day, pointedly using the slur, derived from the Tamil word kuli, as in “wages.” South Asian and Syrian merchants traveled across the American South into the early 20th century, hawking rugs and fabric, or chinoiserie. Then Methodist missionaries began recruiting students from Korea, Japan, and the Philippines to study at Duke, Emory, and Vanderbilt universities.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, known as Hart-Celler, ended the quota-based immigration system and specifically encouraged immigration from Asia and Africa. The Asian population in America grew from 63,000 people in 1870 to 12 million in 2000, and that number has nearly doubled since. They came to America as members of educated professional classes who, in the new country, became Gujarati hotel operators, Korean shopkeepers, Vietnamese nail salon owners, and Hmong chicken farmers.

Woodstock, Georgia, was Cherokee country before its original inhabitants, who had been in the area for 11,000 years, were displaced by white settlers around the mid-1700s. On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, codifying into law the forcible removal of 15,000 Cherokee people from what is today their namesake county. The white settlers panned for gold in nearby rivers, purchased Black people as slaves, and opened chicken-processing plants, still in operation nearly two centuries later.

Woodstock today enjoys a median family income of $76,191, and is almost 80 percent white. It is the hometown of at least two notable figures: Dean Rusk and Eugene Booth. Rusk, who later became secretary of state, was responsible for splitting the Korean peninsula in two using a foldout map from a copy of National Geographic. The line “made no sense economically or geographically,” he later admitted, but it allowed American occupying forces to take control of Seoul, a decision that would divide families for generations. Booth was a nuclear physicist and core member of the Manhattan Project, which led to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, killing as many as 250,000 civilians, according to some estimates. Woodstock is proud of their native sons, naming a middle school after Rusk.

He was a typical mass shooter in that he was white and male. He was unusual in his age—21; the average is 33—and in the fact that, unlike 60 percent of American mass shooters, he did not appear to have a violent history, nor any prior convictions, at least none in the public record. There had been no known childhood trauma, either. He was a product of his social world


CHAPTER 2: THE TRUE CRIME STORIES WE TELL:
Who Owns Amanda Knox? by Amanda Knox. Originally published in the Atlantic, July 2021

Rudy Guede convicted of murdering Meredith Kercher. Knox convicted, acquitted, as was her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. Now, she has a podcast ‘Labyrinths’ and has ‘written journalism’.

Does my name belong to me? Does my face? What about my life? My story? Why is my name used to refer to events I had no hand in? I return to these questions again and again because others continue to profit off my identity, and my trauma, without my consent.My name is the only name that shouldn’t be in that headline.

When Guede was released from prison in late 2020, the New York Post headline read: “Man Who Killed Amanda Knox’s Roommate Freed on Community Service.”

‘Stillwater’ is both “loosely based on” and “directly inspired by” the “Amanda Knox Saga” as Vanity Fair put it in an article published by a for-profit magazine company promoting a for-profit film, neither of which I am affiliated with.….Lifetime produced a film called Murder on Trial in Italy. I sued the network, which resulted in it cutting from the film a dream sequence that depicted me killing Meredith. A few years ago, there was the Fox series Proven Innocent, starring Kelsey Grammer, which was developed and described as “What if Amanda Knox became a lawyer?” The first time I heard from the show’s makers was when they had the audacity to ask me to help them promote it on the eve of its premiere.

- Tie a Tourniquet on Your Heart: Revisiting Edna Buchanan, America’s Greatest Police Reporter by Diana Moskovitz. Originally published in Popula, July 2020

1987 book by Buchanan ‘The Corpse had a Famliar Face’. What struck me, from page one onward, was how police positive it was. How it is littered with calls for tougher justice, using victims as props to demand harsher sentences, and how it ignored all the ways American society sets people up to break the law in the first place. How bad behavior by officers—even the one Buchanan briefly married—is condemned, but never really traced back to any larger issue.

There are moments when she seems to be upholding the values of each and every life, like when she says of families that never get justice, the loss of good people too soon: “There is no dirt-bag murder.” But elsewhere she offers the startling observation that most people have nothing to fear in Miami, because the vast majority of victims “contribute to their own demise.”

“They deal drugs, steal, rob, or stray with somebody else’s mate until a stop is put to them,” Buchanan writes. “Most Miami murder victims have arrest records, most have drugs, alcohol, or both aboard when somebody sinks their ship.” “You should not pity most criminals, either; tie a tourniquet on your heart. Sad and sleazy losers are easy to feel sorry for, until you recall what they have done, over and over and over, and will continue to do, given the chance. They say all they need is a break, but if you check it out, you find they’ve used up lots of them.”

To be a great police reporter—the kind editors champion, the kind that gets raises and promotions, the kind that wins a Pulitzer—you have to be friends with a lot of cops. - author

The older I get, the more I wonder why nobody ever asked why my job was necessary, why everyone believes we live in a world filled with crime (we do not) and that it must include crime reporters.


- The True Crime Junkies and the Curious Case of a Missing Husband by RF Jurjevics. Originally published in Vice, August 2021.

True Crime Junkies, a Facebook group, started and co-adminstered by Melania Boninsegna.
In 2019, it covered the case of Tatiana Badra’s ‘husband’, the missing (later found dead, undetermined causes) Ethan Rendlen.

It was a maddening situation for the family. Rendlen was unable to see what those who loved him found obvious: he was being conned. But, like any good scam, Badra’s had begun with developing a powerful psychological hold over Rendlen. Those mechanics of manipulation don’t “happen overnight,” said Alexandra Stein, a visiting research fellow at London South Bank University who specializes in the study of cults and dangerous social relationships. “This is a process. You get the initial come-on, which is very nice and flattering, and creates rapport and starts building trust.” Badra’s seeming generosity with her inherited money, coupled with constant tales of distress, made for a persuasive lure: a “love-bomb,” in which the victim is showered with attention, affection, and sometimes gifts. Rendlen’s appointment as a knight in shining armor to her constant distress was the clincher. Badra also kept Rendlen isolated from his family, managing to convince him that he had been molested as a child by a relative. “Scammers work with fear,” Stein explained. “A corollary relatedness is urgency: ‘if you don’t help me now, I’m going to lose my child, my house, my life.’ And also the threat that you might lose a relationship that purports to be beneficial to you, but is actually causing you chronic stress. That creates a trauma bond. All of these things work to prevent you [from] using your systematic thinking.”

- Has Reality Caught Up to the “Murder Police”? by Lara Bazelon. Originally published on the Cut, in partnership with the Garrison Project, January 2022, as “David Simon Made Baltimore Detectives Famous. Now Their Cases Are Falling Apart.”

1986: Faheem Ali killed by ____ ; Baltimore homicide detectives Thomas Pellegrini, Richard Fahlteich, and Oscar “The Bunk” Reque on the case.
12-year-old Otis Robinson falsely identified 25 year old black man Gary Washington. His lawyers presented witnesses who said the killer was Lawrence Thomas. In 2018 conviction was overturned. At 57, he walked free.

Since 1989, 25 men convicted of murder in Baltimore have been exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.


PART III SHARDS OF JUSTICS

- Will You Ever Change? by Amelia Schonbek
Originally published in New York Magazine, July 2021

About Domestic Violence Safe Dialogue program and its participants.

- The Prisoner-Run Radio Station That’s Reaching Men on Death Row by Keri Blakinger
Originally published by the Marshall Project, in partnership with the Guardian, December 2021

106.5 FM The Tank, Texas’ Polunsky prison’s own radio station, started in 2020, doesn’t have the fame or following of San Quentin’s Ear Hustle podcast.

- To the Son of the Victim by Sophie Haigney. Originally published in Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us, edited by Colleen Kinder, and republished in the Paris Review, March 2022.
You were generous to me on a day when you had no reason to be. I wish I’d been kinder in return.

- Three Bodies in Texas by Mallika Rao. Originally published in the Believer, March 2022

In Jan. 2014: Pallavi Dhawan was accused of murdering her 10 year old son Arnav. (her behavior on the day of his death was considered weird; the boy had health problems and ME failed to determine a cause of death; Pallavi had mental health challenges). On September 4, 2014, not quite nine months after Arnav’s death, Pallavi and Sumeet Dhawan were both found dead at their home. They were determined to have ingested sleeping pills—Pallavi, a fatal dose; Sumeet, not enough to kill him, according to an autopsy report. He’d died from a fatal blow to the head by a cricket bat. Pallavi had drowned in the backyard swimming pool. The couple were days away from the grand jury trial that would either convict or acquit her.

Fantastic writing from a variety of sources. I really enjoyed this collection and felt it was best absorbed one chapter at a time, to really be able to dig into the story of each. A very good companion and palate cleanser from the pulpiness of true crime podcasts.

Evidence of Things Seen is a great follow up to the previous anthology. I appreciated the approach of who gets to tell crime stories, what is the impact on the survivors and victims' families. I appreciated the essay about the Atlanta Spa shootings and the inherent racism

As a criminal justice professional, collections of articles pertaining to my line of work are fascinating to read. True progress in this world depends on evidence based studies and stories. This collection of articles was well picked and gave an array of topics from the popular true crime to the reality of domestic violence. An article that resonated with myself was “Will You Ever Change?” By Amelia Schonbek. This article discusses a domestic violence dialogue program, giving survivors and perpetrator an opportunity to talk and make sense of their experiences. Criminal justice is a broken system in America, and these stories reflect people who are doing the work to make a change. I found a majority of the stories to be fascinating, however I skimmed through a few. If you are fascinated by the various subcategories of criminal
Justice, this collection is worth the read.

Given that this is an anthology, it does have stronger and weaker pieces. I especially liked the essay about the Atlanta spa shooting, which I knew very little about, and the piece about the very unreliable character in the facebook group. The overarching theme is ambivalence toward the genre of true crime. As Rabia Chaudry points out in the intro, people can become more educated on important topics like police misconduct or junk science through true crime, and there are times when some measure of justice is meted out to victims and wrongfully accused alike. But this collection shows how hard justice is to find. It's a good read for anyone who, like me, is drawn to true crime but wants to consume it as responsibly as possible.

Even if you don’t engage with it, it’s kind of hard to ignore the vast amount of true crime media that is available to us today. Podcasts, documentaries, books, magazine articles…it’s everywhere. And as this genre has grown, so have the number of critiques levied against it.

Evidence of Things Seen is an essay collection exploring this rise of true crime obsession, the valid critiques of the genre, and how it has impacted the criminal justice system. It features articles about crimes that have been neglected by the system, police brutality, and restorative justice and is an essential read for anyone who has ever watched Dateline or read I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. I think everyone can learn something from this book.

Despite the heavy subject matter, the format of this book is easily digestible. The essay format makes it easy to pick this one up when you have time, and if you read it on audio, it feels like you’re listening to a podcast.


My one gripe is that almost all of the essays have been previously published in other media outlets, so if you’re someone who keeps up with crime and justice news, a lot of the content might be familiar. But, if you’re brand new to it, you’re in for a fascinating journey.

Evidence of Things Seen is available now. Thanks to Ecco and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Interesting and well written I just personally couldn’t get into the story. Difficult to follow at times and a little slow. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Thank you Sarah Weinman, Ecco and NetGalley for allowing me to read this ARC e-book. So I am obsessed with true crime so I felt this book was going to be right up my alley. That said it was definitely different than I had expected. In this book Weinmann compiles 14 true crime writers takes on how society truly influences true crime stories and how it influences us. It was actually quite interesting and I was amazed with so many instances and corrilations throughout the story.

This is a collection of essays about criminology and criminal justice I didn’t even know I needed. I feel like I’ve just been injected with a huge dose of knowledge that’s going to take some time to totally soak in, but it feels almost like a vaccine: now that I have read and know these things I can’t unknow them and unthink them. Honestly, I don’t want to. I would rather have this inoculation–this knowledge–in my system than not. Because I have taken a bite of this apple and even though that apple was bitter, I am all the better for that bitter apple. The bitterness will help me remember to stay angry and remind me of my sadness while reading some of these essays.

Evidence of Things Seen is split up into three parts: What We Reckon With (essays about the types of crimes that highlight the social inequities in this country and why they continue to be an issue); The True Crime Stories We Tell (essays about how social media intersects with true crime and how that can affect the time in which a crime is solved or how it can negatively affect the parties involved); and, Shards of Justice (essays featuring discourse on the future of criminal justice).

The first part of the book, What We Reckon With, is by far the largest section of the book, as it takes up almost half of the collection. None of the essays in this collection are bad, but in this section, I found that I was captivated and felt most passionate about an essay called “‘No Choice but to Do It’: Why Women Go to Prison”, by Justine van der Leun, which calls into question why women who are forced to commit heinous crimes by their abusers under extreme duress (like the threat of murder) are charged alongside their abusers as if they are just as guilty of the crime instead of the victim of one. “The Golden Age of White-Collar Crime” by Michael Hobbes is a long essay I thought would bore me (which is a point made about white-collar crime in the essay itself) but actually managed to ensnare me instead by explaining very well how is it that every time another old, white man gets arrested for doing something heinous with money and destroying a bunch of people’s lives all he seems to manage to get is a couple of years in Club Fed. It’s a long but rewarding read. “Picturesque California Conceals a Crisis of Missing Indigenous Women” by Brandi Morin reports on a phenomenon that’s well-known to anyone who lives in Northern California (which I do, though not as far north as she’s reporting on), and that’s the extremely high rate of indigenous Native American women who just up and disappear from reservation lands in the upper third section of the state. If you’ve ever seen the true crime docuseries “Murder Mountain” or read up on “trimmigrants” (the migrant workers, largely female, who make the trek up to the Emerald Triangle every year to harvest the marijuana crop), you might be familiar with how during harvest season it’s not only indigenous women who go missing. It’s a serious problem in general in Northern California; but for Native American women it’s so much worse, because they just get snatched up off their reservations and are never seen again.

In part two, The True Crime Stories We Tell, there’s only one essay I didn’t like too much, and that was “Who Owns Amanda Knox?” by Amanda Knox. The essay itself brings up plenty of valid points about how it feels sometimes that she has a doppelganger walking around that is the Amanda Knox everyone thinks she is instead of the Amanda Knox she actually is and that’s the Amanda Knox people keep thinking they can vilify and make money off of. The only reason I disliked this essay is because it felt a bit whiny. I understand she feels truly victimized after being wrongfully convicted by the Italian government twice, but she has her own podcast and a platform with which to voice her frustrations. I just felt like her essay wasn’t at the same level as the rest included in this collection. The other three essays in this section are all equally interesting and well-written.

In part three, “Shards of Justice”, the first essay, “Will You Ever Change?” by Amelia Schonbek completely floored me. It’s one of the best essays in this whole collection in part because it talks about restorative justice, which is one of my favorite rehabilitation tactics to avoid recidivism rates. In this case, the type of restorative justice they’re talking about is surrogate dialogue. Surrogate dialogue takes the victim of a crime and a perpetrator of the same crime (but a completely unrelated one), and puts them at the same table across from one another. Each of them has an advocate and there is a facilitator to keep everyone in line and stand witness for the non-profit running the program. In order to engage in this program, the victim has to approach the program themself and the perpetrator (who has to be out of jail and be evaluated before being approved for the program) has to want to use this surrogate dialogue to help victims heal. It’s a community service. I found this essay to be touching and thought-provoking, because even though programs like this show great potential to reduce recidivism rates, no one wants to fund them.

Another highlight of this section is “The Prisoner-Run Radio Station That’s Reaching Men on Death Row” by Keri Blakinger, which touches on how music is a universal language, even in prison. It’s a touching and emotional essay about how even the residents of Death Row, cut off from Gen Pop, can be part of the great prisoner community by being allowed to write into their prison radio station and have their words heard or their song requests played.

Don’t forget to read the introduction or the editor’s note. They’re both interesting and informational reads. The introduction has a whole lot to say about the late, great author James Baldwin, who was writing essays about how systemic racism ran long and deep in our criminal justice system long before anyone was willing to listen.

I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: 5 Star Review/Anthology/Biography/History/Nonfiction/True Crime

Overall: This collection of previously published essays and articles provides an overview of what’s on the minds of writers who engage with crime and the criminal justice system in America. As someone who reads the occasional non-fiction book about crime (The Art Thief, We Keep the Dead Close, The Trial of Lizzie Borden), I wanted to see what topics I was familiar with and what I still needed to explore. Could this book help me engage with these stories in an ethical way? Some of the essays took on this topic, especially “Who Owns Amanda Knox?”. I’m glad I took a look at this quick non-fiction read, even though it didn’t deepen and complicate my understanding of the crime writing landscape quite as much as I would have liked. If you’re just starting to read about crime in modern America, though, this might be a good place to start.

Likes: Some of the articles dug deeply into topics that don’t receive a lot of attention – in particular, the essay on women in prison caught my eye. The original statistical analysis and research Justine van de Leun did for this piece, “‘No Choice But To Do It’: Why Women Go to Prison,” provided a combination of data and anecdotal evidence that was extremely compelling to me. Some of these writers are excellent storytellers creating balanced examinations of controversial topics (restorative justice for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault) or nuanced portraits of victims of crimes. The most impactful article for me was by Amanda Knox and in my opinion should be required reading for anyone interested in writing in the true crime genre.

Dislikes: The essays are uneven. While some contain fascinating statistical analysis and innovative reporting, others contain overblown language or random quotes from unattributed sources. Because this is meant as an overview, topics that are vast and nuanced sometimes receive what feels like only a glancing treatment. And I didn’t quite understand why two of the essays engaged with work largely produced during the 80s and early 90s, rather than with more recent books, articles, and podcasts. I wished more of the book had engaged with the conventions of true crime now – which I don’t think, based on my own true crime reading and listening – conform with some of the conventions of 30 years ago.

FYI: murder, violence, sexual assault, domestic violence, death of a child, lynching, racial violence, racism, substance abuse, wrongful conviction.

First off: this is anthology of previously-published pieces; this means you're likely going to run into something that's not your flavor of true crime, that you've already ready someplace else, or both.

Loved the intent of this collection, loved the intro, didn't love all the selections, since a few felt they muddled the focus of the rest. Sarah Weinman has a great eye as an editor for putting together a big picture from all these existing pieces.

This group of True Crime articles we get everything from Amanda Knox lamenting about the publicity she got after her roommate was murdered, a great article on Edna Buchanan in her crime beat, Book an ultimate poult win we also hear about a girl who went public with her sexual assault and then went missing that same day only to be found murdered, a letter to an anonymous murder victim son who the journalist accosted only hours after his dad‘s tragic death and so much more there’s even an article about all the missing indigenous women in California. I found this book engaging but also very sad at the same time but there is a feel good article about the person run radio station at a Texas prison outside of Houston but as far as feel good articles go I do believe that is the only one but having said that I would still highly recommend the spot I found it hard to put down I am always interested and True Crime whether that be murder white collar or something else in this book covers at all. This is a book I highly recommend for any True Crime fans. I received this book from NetGalley and the publisher but I am leaving this review voluntarily please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

Evidence of Things Seen is a fantastic follow up to Unspeakable Acts, Sarah Weinman's prior collected anthology of true crime reporting and cultural criticism. The essays included in both volumes offer the type of thoughtful true crime-adjacent stories that I prefer over the genre's standard breathless recitation of horrific circumstances and grisly events. Instead, this collection focuses on systemic issues at play in both crime and our relationship to crime reporting. The included essays question who gets to be a victim (ie, who is given empathy and the benefit of the doubt), which types of crime are overlooked in the popular imagination, and who is left out of standard true crime narratives. Multiple essays offer thoughtful critiques of various failures of the justice system, illuminating the inherent biases which compromise police investigations and skew crime reporting to predispose the public against certain victims or types of crime, particularly in racial, socioeconomic, and gendered ways. I appreciate that this collection resists the urge to blindly uphold the system as it stands, instead humanizing those who are normally deemed unworthy of empathy.

I remain especially struck by the essay on a prison radio project. I am astounded by how transformational and meaningful the radio project is, particularly for inmates on death row. I found myself considering the inhumane structure of death row in a new way, via the essay's exploration of how transformational this radio program proves by offering an unexpected source of community in a system built to isolate. I found myself wondering about the utility of a new facet of our prison system, thoughts that also carried over from the essay on restorative justice models for victims of domestic violence. The best true crime writing, in my opinion, questions the status quo and challenges our preconceived notions about the workings of the systems of power that make up the criminal legal system. I will be thinking about this collection for some time.