This book is a beautifully produced work; it begins with the history of the Nutshell Studies and their creator, Frances Glessner Lee; the second half This book is a beautifully produced work; it begins with the history of the Nutshell Studies and their creator, Frances Glessner Lee; the second half of the book is what we're here to see, several pages devoted to the murder dioramas themselves.
The dioramas are absolutely fascinating. There's something so transgressive about these murder dollhouses, the dolls lying strangled or bludgeoned or stabbed - in a couple of cases, they're burned or hanged - in an eerie representation of the original victim, in the original setting, down to the cigarettes in the ashtray, the blood spray on the faded wallpaper. Truly labors of obsessive craftmanship.
Each Nutshell lays out the details of how the victim was found, some statements taken at the time, along with pictures of the diorama from different angles, and finally an overlay with important clues (possibly) highlighted and described. In only three nutshells are we actually given the answer; these aren't puzzles, they're learning tools, to teach investigators how to look at a possible crime scene.
I'm less of a fan of the essays and writings, although they were curated and compiled with a lot of care; obviously a woman in a position of authority at this particular time, in this particular field, using dollhouses to construct reproductions of (usually) femicides, often in a domestic setting, is open to a LOT of interpretation.
But let me put on my pedant hat now. In the last study, one of the highlighted objects is a reproduction of a painting, and in the notes the writer makes some comments about the symbolism of the moose.
Unfortunately it's not a moose. It's a copy of a reasonably famous (very famous in its time) painting, The Monarch of the Glen. It's fine that the writer doesn't know that (I'm a little embarrassed that I know it, but it's practically shorthand when setting a Victorian scene to hang that picture, so I've run across it many times) but not to know the difference between a moose and a deer? But ok, we're here to talk about murder, so what does it matter - ? It only matters if you want to insruct me regarding symbolism and you're not even talking about the right symbol. And now I wonder about the other things you told me, which I don't know enough about to fact-check.
I guess what I'm saying is, take the interpretation and the musing and the essays with a grain of salt. But take the Nutshells as they are; amazing art, fantastic workmanship, sorrowful memento moris; because these are all real people who didn't die well....more
This book reflects impressive scholarship and does a good job of setting the Donner tragedy in the context of its time - historically and technologicaThis book reflects impressive scholarship and does a good job of setting the Donner tragedy in the context of its time - historically and technologically - as well as pointing out, at various steps, where the party went wrong, sometimes by the most frustratingly large or small margins. It can be entertaining to track an event back to its inception, and find the point at which tragedy became unavoidable. In this case it was as simple as starting out too late in the season, in addition to trusting the word of a man who guided them badly.
The author has a tendency to overexplain a bit, and to be judgemental; he criticizes the travellers at one point for resorting to cannibalism too soon, when they were probably only extremely hungry, not actually starving to death. It's a question whether anyone can be really sure that they are or aren't actually starving, if they haven't lived through the process before. We live and learn. The amazing thing is that any of the party did live. And for those, there was than the question of how to survive in a strange land, alone in some cases, without belongings or family, having lost everything in transit.
It's so bad by the middle of the story that you almost have to laugh as one misery after another gets piled on. And suffice to say you wouldn't have wanted to be either a native guide or an ox pulling this party's wagon.
If there's a moral it's, Never take no cutoffs.
Informative and awfully entertaining, but not for the empathetic. ...more
