Stranger than Fiction

The subtitle of The Island at the Center of the World , by Russell Shorto, 2004, is The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America , which is a good description of the book. The history of the beginning of the American colonies usually focuses on the settlements by the English: the Puritans of New England, the Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Jamestown, Virginia. This is the history I learned in school. The earlier settlement by the Dutch in Manhattan was briefly taught with the characters Peter Minuit, who supposedly bought the island of Manhattan from the local Indian tribe for $24 worth of wampum, and Peter Stuyvesant, the peg-legged governor of “New Amsterdam” who lost the settlement to the English. It is said that history is written by the victors, and it seems to be the case with the history of Manhattan. Shorto debunks this history by presenting a fascinating story of what early Manhattan and the surrounding Dut...

In London, 1953, the crime that became “the most notorious crime scene in twentieth-century Britain” was the discovery of several corpses of women hidden in the wall and garden at 10 Rillington Place. The murderer, Reginald Christie, had killed his wife and at least seven other women, who he strangled and then raped. Two years before, Timothy Evans, Christie’s upstairs neighbor, had been executed for killing his wife, Beryl, and their 1-year-old daughter, Geraldine, at the same address. But during the investigation of Christie’s crimes, many doubts were raised as to whether Evans had been innocent and Christie the true murderer of Beryl and Geraldine. In The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place , 2024, Kate Summerscale has done extensive research to not only learn the truth about happened, but also to learn more information about the victims – who they were and how their deaths continued to haunt their families. This book is my choice for the category True Crime for the 2025...