Jay Robert NashCritiques

Uppslagsverk över amerikanska brottslingar fram till mitten av 70-talet

OK book on famous Chicago people. Read it just before I moved in that area for a year.

I read his book ages ago-I was probably about 21 years old-and never forgot it. I am fascinated by evil, and at the time I felt this was a great compendium of some pretty nasty individuals.

Possibly the best single volume available on disasters. Only good up to the mid 1970s, but still a good buy for any disaster buff.

I cannot say enough about this book. We picked it up in a used bookstore in Eureka a few weeks ago. It's the best coffee table book ever written: gruesome and engrossing accounts of major disasters! Photos! It's even cross indexed by type of disaster and geological location. Too bad it only covers up to the mid-80s/its publication date. If I were an author I would hunt this down immediately - it contains the making of 192 great novels.

This is a very absorbing read and I only wish it could be updated to include more recent cases. Nash's writing style is engaging as he covers hundreds of disappearances of all types. Photographs and sketches occasionally illustrate the stories. Nash organizes cases by cause of disappearance: chapters are given titles such as "Escape to Love," "Murder Unseen," and, most intriguingly, "No Reason at All." It should be noted that many of the cases he writes about have been solved; the missing person was located months, years and sometimes decades after vanishing. This, it seems, would lend hope to the families of people who have been gone for extensive time periods.

An interesting read, but the author was not particular about verifying his facts, so take everything with a grain of salt.½

THE book on disasters. Some of the narratives are brief, but others go into a good amount of depth. The human element is always foremost in these stories. If you want to learn about disasters, start here. (If you can find it--it is out of print, unfortunately.) - Updated info: Several copies are available at Abebooks at a very low price. Go for it!

Covering films of 1987