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开 本: 大16开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 精装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780307592200
hope, eccentricity, and the timelessness of the bold and strange
than Paul Collins.”—DAVE EGGERS
On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood.
On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover a
floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers
near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown
ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime are turning up all over New
York, but the police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no
motives, no suspects.
The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897,
plunged detectives
headlong into the era’s most baffling murder mystery. Seized upon
by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph
Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Reenactments of the
murder were staged in Times Square, armed reporters lurked in the
streets of Hell’s Kitchen in pursuit of suspects, and an unlikely
trio—a hard-luck cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric
professor—all raced to solve the crime.
What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more
sensational trial: an unprecedented capital case hinging on
circumstantial evidence around a victim whom the police couldn’t
identify with certainty, and who the defense claimed wasn’t even
dead. The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale—a rich
evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful
re-creation of the tabloid wars that have dominated media to this
day.
“[Collins’] exploration of the newspaper world, at the very
moment when tabloid values were being born, is revealing but also
enormously entertaining….Collins has a clear eye, a good sense of
telling detail, and a fine narrative ability.”—Wall Street
Journal
“Riveting….Collins has mined enough newspaper clippings and other
archives to artfully recreate the era, the crime and the newspaper
wars it touched off.”–New York Times
“[A] richly detailed book that reads like a novel and yet maintains
a strict fidelity to facts. THE MURDER OF THE CENTURY isn’t a case
of history with a moral. It’s simply a fantastic, factual yarn, and
a reminder that abhorrent violence is nothing new under the
sun.”–Oregonian
“A wonderful reminder that we have often been just as we are: fools
for spectacle, short of memory, cheered by the invigorating shock
of the immoral.”–Willamette Week
“Paul Collins’ account of the headless torso murder that led to an
all-out newspaper war and then a dramatic trial has all the
timeless elements of a great yarn–a baffling mystery,
intriguing suspects, and flawed detectives. It’s compelling history
that’s also great page-turning entertainment.”– Howard Blum,
author of The Floor of Heaven and American
Lightning
“Wonderfully rich in period detail, salacious facts about
the case and infectious wonder at the chutzpah and inventiveness
displayed by Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s minions. Both a gripping
true-crime narrative and an astonishing portrait of fin de siecle
yellow journalism.”–Kirkus Reviews
“A dismembered corpse and rival newspapers squabbling for headlines
fuel Collins’s intriguing look at the birth of “yellow journalism”
in late–19th-century New York. an in-depth account of the
exponential growth of lurid news and the public’s (continuing)
insatiable appetite for it.”–Publishers Weekly
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