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Monsters are real

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 04-27-23

I followed this trial on CourtTV and since then have watched interviews with Celeste Beard on shows like Facing Evil and Reasonable Doubt, so I thought I had a pretty good idea of what kind of person she was and how she still refuses to accept any responsibility for what she's done, even aside from what she was convicted of doing. This book, though, was a revelation. I had no idea of what Celeste Beard's life before meeting Steven Beard had been like, or how she brought chaos everywhere she went. The things that she got away with before she manipulated her friend Tracey into killing her husband were jaw-dropping. The way that she treated people who loved her was horrifying. I've listened to the book a few times and still can't figure out how she got that way. All that I can come up with is that she was born without a conscience. Everyone who loved or cared about Celeste ended up dead, damaged, or in prison.
The research that went into this book is excellent, and Kathryn Casey shows great empathy for all of Celeste Beard's husbands (all of them, especially Steven Beard), the Beard family and her own daughters, while doing her best to be fair as possible to Celeste herself. Still, based on everything that Celeste is known to have done, she is exactly where she belongs.
This book is highly recommended for true crime fans, and I look forward to reading more of Kathryn Casey's work.

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2 people found this helpful

Good not great

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 08-19-21

I followed this case when it broke, and figured that there was more to it than CourtTV was covering. This didn't disappoint on that count. John Glatt's books are always thorough to a fault, and the narration was wonderful; since the author is British, it just makes sense to have a British narrator. Sometimes there was too much detail -- the horrific description of the dismembered body was probably necessary, but I didn't need to be told several times that the guts spilled out. Gross! So when I listened to the book again, I skipped those parts. It's too bad that we don't know all that much about what was going on in Melanie's head -- but she probably wasn't as chatty as the other murderers that John Glatt has written about.

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1 person found this helpful

All the detail you could want

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 05-25-21

I've seen the TV versions of this story, and this book is so, so much more thorough. The presentation of the story, the depictions of the main characters and the details of the investigation and the trial are great. People who like getting into the weeds of stories like this are going to be riveted by it; others who prefer a bird's eye view, not so much. I also enjoyed the measured pace of the narration. It was easy to tell from the writing that the book wasn't written by an American, and having a British narrator seemed appropriate and after a while I didn't even notice it. This audiobook exceeded my expectations.

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1 person found this helpful

Too much crazy for TV

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 03-24-21

I’ve seen the TV movie and the murder channel episodes about Marie Hilley, so didn’t expect too many surprises in this book. It went into an impressive amount of detail, which some people might find tiresome but I didn’t. And yes, Marie was even more of a sociopath than she’s been depicted and got away with a lot more than the crimes for which she was convicted. The delivery initially struck me as a bit flat, but proved effective. The narrator’s understated tone when describing the horrific things that Marie did actually made the content easier to follow and remember. People who can never get too far into the weeds and minutiae will like this audiobook but those who would prefer just the highlight reel should probably take a pass on it.

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1 person found this helpful

A white hot mess of a life

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 02-08-21

Gerald Clarke excels at writing thoughtful and clear-eyed biographies of tormented souls; his biography of Truman Capote made me eager to read his book on Judy Garland and it did not disappoint. I thought that I knew all the details about her tragic life, but this book was a revelation. Without casting her as a helpless victim, misunderstood genius or drug-addled lunatic, Gerald Clarke presents a life of a woman with severe mental illness and addictions whose problems were exacerbated by bad luck, bad decisions, bad men and bad timing. At the same time, she was a brillant performer and was lost when one professional door after another closed on her, largely because of her addictions and possible bipolar disorder. The trajectory of her life and career was even more heartbreaking than I'd thought, and I ended the book understanding how she wore out and alienated the people who cared about her, and attracted people who were out to use and exploit her. It's sad that the kind of resources that are available now weren't available during her lifetime. The narration was perfect.

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1 person found this helpful

A glimpse into an astonishing life

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 09-20-20

I have the three-volume graphic memoir by John Lewis, but this book fleshes out that story in ways that perhaps Rep. Lewis was too modest to do. The biography goes into great detail about John Lewis' faith in ways that might be off-putting to people who aren't in his faith tradition (and some might quibble with the characterization of John Lewis as a modern saint), but it really gives insight into where he got his moral strength and values. The stories of the arrests, the beatings and yes, the torture that he endured in the 1950s and 1960s are harrowing. It only made me admire him all the more. The biography ends with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. John Lewis' political career, which is kind of an anticlimax, is summed up in an epilogue and Representative Lewis gets the last word. The narration is slow, thoughtful, and perfect for this book. I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about John Lewis, or who thought that they already knew what he accomplished when he was still a very young man.

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14 people found this helpful

Sisters are complicated

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 04-14-20

My brother-in-law recommended this book to me, which made me wonder if he suspects that my little sister is a sociopath. Anyway, I found the family and workplace relationships much more interesting than the murders.The narrator could probably have made any story interesting since she is so self-aware and observant; most of the other characters -- except for one -- seemed one-dimensional in comparison. And it had been a while since I read a novel that was set in an African country, so I enjoyed that too. There were a couple of twists that I might have seen coming had I read the book instead of listening to it but like many others have commented, the ending was a letdown. It was just an ending, not a resolution. I do hope that Brathwaite picks up some of the loose threads in her next novel, or retells it from the other sister's point of view.

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1 person found this helpful

I love long biographies of difficult people

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 01-14-20

I learned a bit about Alain Locke in grad school, when studying the history of Africans and African Americans in Europe after World War I. His name popped up in most of my sources and although I was curious about him, his work wasn't central to my research. This biography is answering all of my questions about him. It's not an easy listen, though, and people who don't have a decent knowledge of African American intellectual history and the Harlem Renaissance might find it overwhelming. For me, though, it's an embarrassment of riches. I am learning about his connections with people that I had no idea he knew, like Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Mason. At the same time, Locke does not emerge as particularly likeable, but given the things that he has to struggle with -- not the least of which were chronically bad health and living as a gay black man -- his tendency to be manipulative, intellectually dishonest (at times) and defensive, bordering on paranoid, makes sense. I have to admit that it took me about three months of off and on reading and a few restarts to complete this tome, because of the length and its density, but I enjoy biographies like this that get into the messiness of a life. The last chapter, that discusses Locke's death and Locke's legacy, soars.

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2 people found this helpful

We would have been great friends

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 05-16-19

I've read Hansberry's work and had been looking for a comprehensive intellectual biography of her for a long time. This one is excellent in discussing Lorraine Hansberry's family, relationships, creative process, activism and inner life. She sounds like a lot of women that I knew in college and grad school: brilliant, energetic, fun-loving, but also passionately committed to social justice and confident in her ability to make it a reality. The book has left me feeling an immense sense of loss that she died so young, because there were so many more contributions that she could have made, and because her voice was so important to the civil rights movement, to what would become the LGBTQ community, and to the arts. At the same time, I have to feel grateful that she accomplished as much as she did in the time that she had. Someone, though, really needed to tell Lisa Gay Hamilton how to pronounce Andre Gide's name correctly ("jeed," not "guide"). Otherwise, no quibbles about her reading of this biography. This is one audiobook that I will not archive, because I will be listening to it again.

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6 people found this helpful

Refreshing thoughts

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 04-02-19

I used to think that no one but Toni Morrison should narrate Toni Morrison's books, but this reading changed my mind. This is a wonderful collection of essays that showcases the breadth and depth of Morrison's thoughts as an artist, an activist, an intellectual and as someone with a deep love of humanity, and a sense of hope despite...well, everything. I'd thought that I could listen to this one essay at a time, in bites, but ended up bingeing over a couple of days. Like her other writings, it's too rich to take in all at once, and I am looking forward to seeing what I missed when I listen to it again and again.

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36 people found this helpful