While I've never delved particularly into the mysteries surrounding Jack the Ripper, or in depth into the locale/time period, this book laid out for me a large number of things that I never knew, or had only come across in passing (lack of) detail. Not just about Jack the Ripper, but about society, history, culture.

In fact, the book lives up to the promise of its cover/title and gives short shrift to Jack the Ripper, which is a nice change. Each section follows one of these five women from her birth to her murder (the latter covered in very brief detail), as best/where possible with records of the time, and along the way does its best to connect the reader with the women, through their hardships, joys, personalities, and choices.

It's excellently done, fascinating, at times horrifying, and always keeps the women centric in their own stories. Speculation is presented where helpful, but only under the heading of speculation - whether it is of reasons one of the women might have made a particular choice, or to posit potential happenings to fill in a blank in her life as history records it. ( )

Everyone knows the overall story of Jack the Ripper, but what about the women he murdered? Rubenhold does an amazing job of going into extreme detail to each of their lives, right down to what they were carrying the nights of their murders. She breaks down the myths that have followed the women through the years. It's a non-fiction book told with the intensity of a thriller, and I could not put it down. ( )

Def something I plan to reread, a whole lot slower. This might be a non-audio reread. ( )

The Five was a hard book to get through. I don't find reading non-fiction easy. Few non-fiction titles hold my interest if it's a physical book I'm reading, and I have learned that the best way to handle non-fiction is on audiobooks. For some reason I bought a paper copy of this book, maybe it wasn't available on the Scribd app? - and that was my undoing.

The book tells the story of the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper. There may have been other victims, but these five - Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary - are the ones whom most historians accept were definitive victims of the Ripper. The book tells the story of their lives. I will easily admit that the record-searching and novel ways of finding out facts about their lives was nothing short of breathtaking. For most of the women Rubenhold can give meticulous details about their clothing, their lives, where they lived, why they turned to prostitution. As an act of research, it is excellent. As an act of entertaining and informing her readers, she falls down in my opinion.

One thing that evoked the strongest of pity from me is an appendix to the book, which lists exactly what each woman owned at the time of their murders. These are some of the saddest lists I've ever seen. Polly owned only the clothes she stood up in. That's all. The other women owned little more. Feeling poor because I couldn't afford portabella mushrooms today (they were $13.00 EACH), is a far cry from the utter poverty of Victorian London. If I ever get a time machine, that is not an era to which I will venture.

Two stars for research well done; three missing because it took me two weeks to read a 330 page book because it was so dull. ( )

This book focuses on the lives of the five accepted or 'canonical' victims of the murderer known as Jack the Ripper. Through the documentary evidence that does exist - birth, marriage and death certificates, census returns and in one case, a letter from a sister of one victim published in a newspaper - the author attempts to build a picture of the life of each woman and the individual tragedies that led to four of them being homeless. Drink played a big part in the social descent of most of them from relatively prosperous lifestyles and, despite the censorious and titillating attitude of the newspapers at the time, only one was a prostitute. Ironically, she had had a comfortable existence in the West End until being forced to lie low in Whitechapel through no fault of her own.

There is a lot of interesting information on the lives of the poor in Victorian Britain and the double disadvantage of being female as well as poor. Some of the narrative is speculative but the author is honest where that is the case. The suggestion that the target victims were attacked while sleeping was a novel one to me and made sense. I found it an absorbing read and would award it 4 stars. ( )