Customer Reviews

The Best American Crime Writing: 2003 Edition: The Year's Best True Crime Reporting

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Simply stated, the "Best American" series is a national treasure. This is only the second volume of the Crime Writing entry, and it is already up there with Best American Mystery Stories and Best American Sports Writing in terms of quality. All of the Best American books feature great use of the written word, regardless of subject matter. In that sense, this book is a home run.

The book starts out with "Big Shot," the tragic tale of former NBA star Jayson Williams, and of the less famous man he unfortunately killed while showing off a gun in his home. "The Counterterroist" is about a wourld renowned FBI counterterrorism expert who retired to become head of security at the World Trasde Center, only to die in the attacks two weeks later. "The Last Ride of Jesse James Hollywood" is a disturbing spectacle of bored modern youth. "The Enron Wars" provide a great insiders view of that scandal. "How Two Lives Met in Death" is a heartbreaking tale of an Israeli and Palestinian teenager, one of whom killed the other in a senseless suicide bombing. And "The Bully of Toulon" describes how a psychotic resident of a small town instituded an atmosphere of fear among his neighbors until it exploded into violence.

These great tales and much more await those who decide to sit down with the 2003 edoition of Best American Crime Writing.

This book is a compilation of a number of true crime articles written during 2002. The influence of 9/11 and terrorism is abundant. But many of the other stories delve into a more "bizarre" area of crime and the criminal mind. While none of the articles blew me away, all were solid and interesting. Anyone looking for true crime from a slightly different angle should look here.

The 2003 edition of Best American Crime Writing is similar to the other books in the series. There are some great stories, but most are OK. The unique aspect of this edition is that it heavily focuses on stories that relate to terrorism and the 9-11 attacks. I thought that a lot of the 9-11 stories were a bit dated.

In my opinion, the outstanding stories in this edition are:

- Big Shot (from GQ) - about former NBA star Jayson Williams' inadvertent killing of a limousine driver.
- The Day Treva Throneberry Disappeared (from Texas Monthly) - about a young woman who disappeared after an abusive childhood. She traveled through the US, always returning to high school. After she'd spent 15 years in various high schools, her secret came out; but she still refuses to acknowledge her true identity.
- The Boy Who Loved Transit (from Harper's) - about a New York City man who loves the City's trains. He has spent his life impersonating a transit worker.
- Mad Dogs and Lawyers (from Rolling Stone) - about the infamous dog mauling in San Francisco. Some of the details from this one are unbelievable; the two lawyers are true cranks.
- My Undertaker, My Pimp (from Harper's) - a strange character study about a man who left the funeral home business to run a Nevada brothel.

This collection of short articles would be a good book to read when you are "between books" and don't want to commit to reading a full-length book. My only caveat would be to remember that the stories vary in quality.

These books are all excellent if you are a true crime reader and in between books. They go through an extensive selection process to get the best stories of the year. From 2002 through 2007, I have loved every one of them.

Eh. A bit disjointed, uneven - not every story is good, no story is great. This being my first foray back into crime writing since renouncing the genre after a bad meeting with an account of the Bernardo murders (I believe they were known as the Ken and Barbie killers in the Yoo Ess of Aye), I swore I wouldn't bother again.

But this collection seemed sedate enough, with credits from such magazines as GQ, Harper's and Vanity Fair. The pieces collected are well-written for the most part, but vary from being only mildly interesting to boringly lurid.

I'm looking forward to my next read.