A Death in Belmont

I hadn’t read Junger’s blockbuster uA Perfect Storm/u, but I ihad/i read a bunch of his articles in Vanity Fair magazine. I remembered his writing as incisive and as objective as humanly possible. I had high hopes for this book.The confessed Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, once helped build an addition to Junger’s childhood home. I expected an insightful snapshot of Junger’s upper middle class suburb of Boston circa mid 1960s a description of how knowing that a serial killer had penetrated their secure bubble of bourgeoisie affected the populace. Instead, I got a messy, sprawling, ruminating book about pretty much nothing.brJunger went into a lot of detail about a murder which occurred a few blocks from his home, a murder later confessed to by Albert DeSalvo, but for which a black day laborer had been convicted. If Junger had focused on that particular murder and used it as a jumping board to explore racism or poverty, or…something, it might have been a decent book. He didn’t. He wrote about two times Albert DeSalvo freaked his mother out, he provided a primer on serial killer behavior as insightful as but WAY wordier than the a href=[URL not allowed] target=”blank” Wikipedia article on serial killers/a, he wrote far too long about elementary justice system history – a topic which has been exhaustively and, frankly, more entertainingly covered by pretty much any prolific true crime writer, and he ended it all by asking WHY? WHY? as if he was writing an eighth grade gifted and talented English class essay.brIt’s a shame. Someone needed to tell Junger during writing that his book was an unfocused mess. But no one did. This is a case of Junger’s success hurting him. His writing style is crisp as ever, though, so I can’t say the book ******. But it was too blurry to enjoy.

'A Death in Belmont' is guaranteed to be a great book club selection for discussion! In 260 pages it manages to offer several possible topics for a vigorous airing of opinions: 1. A white man, Albert DeSalvo, confessed to a dozen of the rape-strangulation murders of women around the Boston, Massachus......more

Sebastian Junger is a great non-fiction writer in any circumstance, but he's especially well-suited to cover the Boston Strangler story. Why? Well, because the man who was in all likelihood the culprit of said stranglings was also working on an addition to his family's house in 1962 in Belmont,......more

When Sebastian Junger was a kid, a neighbor was murdered in a way consistent with the Boston Strangler, who was then stalking the city. A black man was convicted of the crime on rather inconclusive evidence. At the time, the construction crew working on a renovation project in the Junger household i......more

If my mom had a near miss with a suspected serial killer, I'd want to write a book about it too. So, I get the impulse, but it's a meandering kind of story with random focus on different events and the necessary indecisive ending. Interesting enough overall, so I don't mind reading a book like that......more

I was a little dubious about Junger because he's been so over-hyped, but this is in fact an excellent book that looks at the Boston Strangler case from a somewhat sideways perspective (the death in Belmont of the title): a murder that Albert DeSalvo didn't confess to and that another man was convict......more