Hallie Rubenhold

The Five was a hard book to get through. I don't find reading non-fiction easy. Few non-fiction titles hold my interest if it's a physical book I'm reading, and I have learned that the best way to handle non-fiction is on audiobooks. For some reason I bought a paper copy of this book, maybe it wasn't available on the Scribd app? - and that was my undoing.

The book tells the story of the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper. There may have been other victims, but these five - Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary - are the ones whom most historians accept were definitive victims of the Ripper. The book tells the story of their lives. I will easily admit that the record-searching and novel ways of finding out facts about their lives was nothing short of breathtaking. For most of the women Rubenhold can give meticulous details about their clothing, their lives, where they lived, why they turned to prostitution. As an act of research, it is excellent. As an act of entertaining and informing her readers, she falls down in my opinion.

One thing that evoked the strongest of pity from me is an appendix to the book, which lists exactly what each woman owned at the time of their murders. These are some of the saddest lists I've ever seen. Polly owned only the clothes she stood up in. That's all. The other women owned little more. Feeling poor because I couldn't afford portabella mushrooms today (they were $13.00 EACH), is a far cry from the utter poverty of Victorian London. If I ever get a time machine, that is not an era to which I will venture.

Two stars for research well done; three missing because it took me two weeks to read a 330 page book because it was so dull.… (mais)