Customer Reviews

Shake the Devil Off: A True Story of the Murder that Rocked New Orleans

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I just want to thank Ethan again for the excellent way he handled Zack's story. I am Zack' Mom and I wasn't going to read this book as I thought it would be too painful, but I kept looking at the cover and then the pictures and then a few lines and I was hooked. It was like I got to see inside the 10 years I lost with Zack. When I'd talk to him, everything would be "I'm fine Mom!" Evidently, not. It has given me a closure at last to the last three years of not really knowing what happened to my son. He was a wonderful gentle giant with a big heart--not a horrible monster as some proclaimed after the murder. I just hope someone can learn something from this sad tale. Ethan has done a wonderful job of this story---as hard as it was to read some parts---I thank him for his hard work and dedication to getting the true story out. Zack's Mom

After tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, Zack Bowen went home to New Orleans only to face Hurricane Katrina. Haunted by both his military and storm experiences he killed his girlfriend, Addie Hall, and then committed suicide, leaving behind a stunned city and a devastated group of family and friends.

Like the central person in this book, the story fails to realize its potential. Brown seems to flail in the beginning as he tries to eulogize a person and a situation he doesn't quite understand. He finds firmer ground as he recounts Zack's tours overseas, interviewing the soldiers that shared his experiences. A new husband and father, Zack finds himself torn between his duty to his country and more importantly to his comrades, and his very ill wife and two small children. When the Army denies his request to join his wife on a German base as she undergoes life-threatening treatment for hepatitis, Zack's positive attitude towards the military is replaced with seething anger. This anger only underscores his disagreement with the two wars, and eventually Zack quietly decides to get out of the military. Despite an impressive service record, he is discharged for failure to do an adequate number of push-ups and his discharge denies him much-need veterans benefits.

From there, Zack's life begins a downward spiral. He and his wife separate and he hooks up with Addie, a mercurial bartender in the French Quarter. Zack supports himself delivering groceries and tending bar and his girlfriend does much the same. When Katrina hits New Orleans the couple hunkers down and actually turns the whole experience into an adventure. Their freedom ends when military forces finally arrive in NO to restore order. From there, Zack and Addie's relationship grows increasingly turbulent and ends in a murder-suicide that no one saw coming.

In the last third of the book, Brown theorizes that Zack suffered from undiagnosed PTSD and that had he been given adequate medical care none of this would have happened. The last several chapters are devoted to the staggering murder rate in NO, the military's unwillingness to help its vets, and Brown's own inexplicable love for NO. Brown, who moved to NO to research and write the book and wound up staying, writes a lot about his own feelings and experiences in NO and the French Quarter.

While the evidence about the lack of mental health care for military personnel is compelling and the murder statistics for NO are mind-boggling, the chapters on them feel like they belong in another book. Had Brown incorporated more of these facts and anecdotes throughout the earlier chapters they would have seemed more relevant and the book would have flowed better. Brown's own story of moving to NO and falling in love with the people of NO is worthy of an epilogue, but did not belong in the body of the book. In the final chapters, Brown seems to merely use Zack and Addie's story as a way to preach about the corruption and apathy in both the US government and the New Orleans government and police force. While those factors are relevant to the story, it is the human story of these two people that draws readers.

Overall, this book feels incomplete. We are left without knowing the fate of Zack's wife and two small children. We do not know how his mother and brother have dealt with Zack's death or his horrific actions. No one from Addie's family is even interviewed regarding her death and there is no explanation as to why. There is no way to answer all the questions about this story, but some of the most basic ones are not even asked.

Is it possible to humanize a murderer to excess? Throughout this rambling account of Zack Bowen's life and death, I couldn't "shake" the image of Addie Hall's body parts simmering on a kitchen stove. While Zack's life is examined in rich and sympathetic detail, Addie is a "firecracker" who we only come to know through her explosions. Even her face is obscured on the book's cover.

As other reviewers have pointed out, the linkage of Bowen's obscene act with PTSD is forced, almost like padding. Maybe Bowen chose the military BECAUSE he had homocidal urges. By the end of the book I wanted to puke if faced with one more description of Bowen as a great guy who "must have been in a lot of pain". What a wildly irrelevant observation. The painful episodes of Bowen's life rendered here don't stand out in any way from millions of other people's. The author solemnly tells us that Bowen was disappointed when he didn't win high-school homecoming king. So intent on building a case for unremitting stress on the shy and awkward Bowen, the book almost veers off into farce. Finally, there is not one voice among all Bowen's friends that declares "I thought I knew the guy, but obviously I didn't. He was someone who could present himself as likable and non-violent. So can many killers."

My sympathy is for the victim. Her story, like many female victims of male violence, is howling in the wind.

As a New Orleans resident, I was just as fascinated/sickened by the Zack/Addie murder when it first hit the news here. It was probably the same fascination that Ethan Brown felt, which was enough to result in him moving here and writing this book. Although Mr. Brown obviously has done a lot of research for this book, I simply was not happy with his results and conclusions, and feel he was way off the mark in some places. In the end, the book winds up being more of a testament to a questionable lifestyle led by some people here which could only be summed up as a New Orleans fantasy. Zack Bowen and Addie Hall felt that they were doing something good for the city by staying in the French Quarter after Katrina as "holdouts", appearing in the New York Times and other major papers, but in reality they were just living out their New Orleans fantasy - staying wasted and working as little as possible, while in other sections of town, people were drowning and dying in their attics. Their statement of disregarding orders to evacuate and being maverick holdouts in the city meant nothing, and accomplished nothing.

This book spends far too much time in Iraq. Half the book takes place during Zack's days in the service, in Kosovo and Iraq; the author is unable to really draw clear lines between Zack's experiences and the murder he commits later in the story. It's speculation to say that undiagnosed PTSD is what caused Zack to murder Addie Hall, and Ethan Brown doesn't seem to factor in other important things such as Zack being drunk most of the time; his secret homosexuality (which is glossed over in the book and never examined as a reason for his self-esteem issues); and the details of Addie's abuse of him. We also learn very little of Addie's background, other than she seemed to drift here from North Carolina, had an abusive childhood, and was pretty much known around town as a volatile psycho-drunk. I wanted to know much more about her, but little is found out, and Brown doesn't dig deep enough.

The book concludes that Zack was driven to murder by a combination of PTSD, rejection, and the effects of his volatile, abusive relationship. It's also just as possible that Zack was drunk as a skunk, Addie was cutting him down over his gay trysts, and he lost control for that fateful moment, strangling her. Who knows? There are no real answers found in this book, which reaches a terrible conclusion by not knowing where to lay the blame for the violence in this city - Ethan Brown just pins the tail on the stereotypical donkeys - Ray Nagin and the NOPD - instead of digging deeper into decades of racism and inequality.

Zack Bowen and Addie Hall come across as two would-be hipsters who didn't have the intelligence or maturity to know what they were really dealing with in this tough, long-suffering city - it was more important to pose themselves as bar scene heros by refusing to leave the city after Katrina, and when the fun was over, the drugs, booze, and their own immaturity created a perfect storm that wound up in murder. In some strange way, they seem to deserve each other. To Bowen and Hall, New Orleans was just a drunken fantasy playground; they had no appreciation for its history and no respect for its dangers.

PTSD, Iraq and Katrina.

The books strings investigation and reporting on these topics on the frame of the murder-suicide of Zack Bowen and Addie Hall. So far so good. Very good indeed. The incompetence and reckless disregard shown to Bowen by the military, and to the people of the US by the Bush administration would be hard to believe without the demonstration provided by such reports.

BUT.

The author manages to ignore blazingly obvious factors. Simply, Bowen and Hall were spiralling downhill on booze and cocaine well before Bowen joined the army, let alone the arrival of Katrina. Relationships this sick burst into violence every day, everywhere. We will not escape this river of blood so long as we refuse to treat alcoholism as a primary disorder. Though aggravated by PTSD or social traumas like Katrina, alcoholism is not caused by them.

not one to write a review normally,but this is a really interesting read. it is about an unspeakable crime,but also about new orleans as it struggled and still struggles post katrina. it surprised me so much that i am pecking out this recommendation on my kindle after reading straight through. if you like intelligent non fiction crime read this.

Honestly, I don't remember when I last read such a heartbreaking book. Indeed, I had a hard time turning each page, knowing that I would confront on most of them new layers of distress unleavened by vestiges of hope or timely intervention.

Yet Brown is a sharp investigative reporter who has a story to tell--kind of a morality play about a strapping (6'10") antihero with size 17 feet named Zachery Bowen. The book begins with Zack as a high-school senior, with no plans for after graduation, as he fails to make homecoming king. Crushed by this defeat, he drops out of school and becomes a bartender at age 18 while doing drugs on the side. Soon he meets Lana, a striper at a topless club who is ten years his senior, and gets her pregnant. After his initial rejection of fatherhood he becomes smitten with his son, and he and Lara marry, with daughter Lilly following just two years after Jaxon. With "no education and [just] a dumb bar job," Zack enlists in the Army to make something of himself and to provide for his family.

But from here on out, things go from bad to worse. Lana is diagnosed with Hepatitis C while Zack is serving as an MP in the Middle East conflict, and the military won't let him join her during her potentially fatal interferon treatment. This sours him on being a soldier, as does his skepticism about why the United States is even fighting over there. He eventually comes home--like many of the friends he has made in the service, whose stories Brown also relates in painful detail--with PTSD. When he arrives back home, Lana informs Zack that she has started seeing someone else. Cut loose from his family, he soon meets fellow New Orleans bartender Addie Hall, who is thin and just over 5' tall. Given to dark, moody spells and violent relationships that trigger her own abusive behavior, Addie begins an inauspicious relationship in August of 2005 with Zack just five days before Hurricane Katrina hits. Much of the book's subsequent content details how the American government failed to deal with this catastrophe, as well as with the crisis of returning military personnel like Zack who could get no help for their war-related psychiatric disabilities. Expect more personal accounts.

Long story short, Zack ends up unable to cope with his train wreck of a life. Arrests, short prison stints, and nonstop fighting are all evidence that his and Addie's relationship has descended into total madness fueled by their heavy alcohol and cocaine use. He begins cheating on her with gay men, and she taunts him about his sexuality. Completely undone by October of 2006, he strangles her to death and thirteen days later leaps to his death from a hotel rooftop. A suicide note in his pocket leads the police to find her body in their apartment, which had been chilled to a frosty 60 degrees. There they find some body parts roasted and others boiled, and her torso bagged in the refrigerator. "Gal Pal Gumbo," a local newspaper exclaims.

Perhaps this book ought to carry a warning: "Graphic content and explicit human misery throughout. Proceed with caution."

Ethan Brown has written an ambitious murder mystery in which he takes the true account of Zachery Bowen, a loveable giant tending bar in New Orleans and who coming back from a tour in Iraq committed a ghastly murder suicide. The ambition of Brown's account is the author's conflation of events that are behind Zachery's tragic turn: the misguided war in Iraq, the lack of post-war trauma (PTSD) treatment for victims such as Zachary Bowen; the US government's involvement in the Abu Ghraib atrocities; the government's gross mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina.

No doubt about it, the book's author Ethan Brown wants to use Zachery's tragedy to not only sensitively portray Zachery's life that led up to his violent upheaval; Brown also wants to excoriate the Bush Administration's role in Zachery's life so that we the readers can make implications regarding the thousands of other vets coming back from Iraq.

Through the lens of Zach, we see how he is traumatized by the death of people he cares about in Iraq, fellow soldiers, an Iraqi boy whom Zach "adopts" and the "dispirited" state Zach suffers at these losses. We see that before the war Zack "had been talkative and gregarious" but after he returned from Baghdad, "Zack was quiet, withdrawn, and brooding." His cynicism grows when he discovers that weapons of mass destruction are never found his objections to the war intensify.

It is painful to read that Zack with "documented postdeployment mental health symptoms, was mercilessly kicked to the curb by the military" and denied VA benefits. It is even more painful to read the subsequent deterioration.

This makes for anguished, angry reading and is a complement to the book and film version of Born on the Fourth of July.

What could have been a really interesting book fell flat. I think the author put his all in the book however, there was alot of unnecessary information thrown in - history of New Orleans (didn't need that much to tell this story, the killer and victim weren't even from there), Hurricane Katrina (again, nothing to do with the murder), other murders (Zach killed Addie and no one else so why briefly touch on murders he had nothing to do with?). There should have definately been more information about Addie she was as complex a person as one could be. I also feel the author was sympathetic to Zack and I have no idea why he would be. Zach made one poor choice after another. While I think Zach's time in the military might have played a minor part in his behavior, I don't feel in any way that created the person he was - Zach's drug and alcohol abuse is what fueled his mental illness. I like just the facts - tell me about the killer and the victim, I don't really need to know the history of the town, the founding fathers or the weather.

I will never understand how someone can write page after page defending a drug addict and murderer. It is not the governments job to hold every persons hand, Zack made his own choice in life and it's not Americas fault. Being from Louisiana, and working the aftermath, I saw first hand the devastation in New Orleans, Mr. Brown it is easy to point your finger at everyone else, when your hands are so clean.