Wallace is better known as "the other man" in the history of the discovery of the natural selection concept, and for his early studies on biogeography and tropical nature. But--and this is one of the things that makes him a fascinating figure for study--he was also an avid supporter of spiritualism. This book collects five of his essays on spiritualism (the three that went into the original edition of 1875, plus two added to a new edition published twenty years later). Wallace was a thoughtful and excellent writer, and the three main essays, at least, provide some very interesting fodder for thought--especially the one on David Hume and miracles. Unfortunately, nowhere in this collection can one find any indication of why and how Wallace's adoption of spiritualism fit into his overall worldview, natural selection and all, and why this over 100 year old work is still relevant to today's concerns.... Instead, one ends up scratching one's head and wondering, "Can any of this be true...?" Still, this is just about as good a treatment of why one should be interested in the subject as can be obtained, even now.

This true crime story is a quick and breezy recounting of a New York murder case that took twenty-seven years to resolve. It weighs in at less than seven pages per year, though it does not pretend to be a thorough or chronological unraveling of this off-again-on-again investigation. There is no attempt to get inside the killer's brain. The killer, Frankie Koehler, was in fact known from the outset. And when all is said and done, this cold blooded killer from Hell's Kitchen comes across as the stable fulcrum between the plodding obsessiveness of the soon-to-retire detective Andy Rosenzweig and the killer's cynically manic defense attorney, "Don't Worry Murray" Richman. The disparity between these two men's personalities is surreal. If there was a story in how the detective and the lawyer interacted, Gourevitch doesn't tell it. The author gives his readers glimpses of the lives of many of the key players and victims, but does not provide us with any of the texture and depth of portraiture that a truly gifted storyteller might. If John Berendt (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) is Rubens, Gourevitch is a cartoonist or quick sketch artist. He expects each gesture to speak volumes; few do. Where his brevity and superficiality pay off is in the creation of a sense of how given to chance and circumstance anyone's life is. However, to call this book an existential look at a criminal act would be more than generous. Even so, it makes you wonder how many crimes go unresolved due to lethargy, human indifference, and careerism that favors closing a case over admitting the inability to resolve it. Worth a read if you like the true crime genre and have an hour to kill.

Philip Gourevitch's most recent book still has the theme of crime and justice, which were written in his previous work on the Rwandan genocide. This time, albeit on a lesser scale, his subject is Frank Koehler, who shot and killed two proprietors of a New York restaurant, Ritchie Glennon and Pete McGinn, in cold blood one night on 18 February 1970, after he had an argument with them. Koehler was never apprehended for his crimes until 1997. On the other side, there is Andy Rosenzweig, a homicide detective who, almost accidentally, was reminded of the murder of his friend Glennon and remembered that the case was still "cold," or unsolved. Determined to break the ice surrounding Koehler's disappearance - he was written off as dead by New York police - Rosenzweig reopened the file and ended up catching Koehler on 30 July 1997, as he was returning to New York from his exile in California.

This book is a quick read, but does answer some very disturbing questions, particularly about the psychology and mindset of a killer. Koehler's murder of Glennon and McGinn was not the first time he had killed someone: in mid-1945, when he was fifteen years old, he had killed his accomplice in theft for backstabbing him. On the side, he engaged in petty and grand theft, eventually landing himself Mob connections until he had to flee New York. Once captured, writes Gourevitch, Koehler never thought of why he was in prison, or why exactly he was being punished: "...he was sitting in prison, and the most striking thing about the tens of thousands of words he produced at Rikers [his prison] is that he never acknowledges why he is there. Glennon? McGinn? Murder? Not a word. Koehler simply glides from New York to California, as if one day he had decided for the sheer goodness of it to renounce a way of life that was hurting him with its falseness and futility. In his telling...he saves himself and gives himself a new life" (p. 147). The psychology of a low-life killer: unrepentant, unremorseful, and unsympathetic to what he did, instead blaming his family, Rosenzweig, and even God for his failings.

Andy Rosenzweig, the man who brought him to justice, is portrayed as a man who is incapable of sitting still as a bystander to any crime, even on the eve of his retirement (of course, even after). This is, of course, for the better; he is a model for others who wear a uniform and don a shining badge and loaded gun in holster. A stagnant case left unsolved for almost three decades suddenly is solved with an arrest; the end result of Rosenzweig's overcoming of obstacles and dead-end leads.

Gourevitch's book is also a wonderful cast of real-life characters from all walks of life, ranging from the people in Koehler's life, namely his wife and girlfriend; Murray Richman, the top-notch defense lawyer who wound up defending Koehler even though the case never went to trial, as a result of a plea bargaining process that landed him in jail, but eligible for parole in the summer of 2003. In reading this book, I kept being reminded of what Arts and Entertainment Network use as their motto for the "Biography" series: "Every life has a story." Gourevitch has picked an ordinary case from a plethora of New York crimes and has proven this motto. Indeed, there is much that one can learn and glean from the "ordinary."

I don't like to leave things hanging and I thought it might make it a little less hard to retire if I got this thing settled. -Andy Rosenzweig, A Cold Case In this short but surprisingly affecting book, Philip Gourevitch examines just one "cold case", a twenty seven year old double murder that has bothered Andy Rosenzweig since it occurred. In 1970, after an argument in a bar, Frank Koehler met the two men he'd been in the earlier confrontation with and left them, Richie Glennon and Pete McGinn, dead on the floor of McGinn's apartment. Koehler then disappeared. Rosenzweig was just a patrolman then, but Glennon had attended his wedding, so the failure of police to ever capture Koehler was galling. In 1997, with his retirement just around the corner, Rosenzweig was on his way to the doctor's office and passed by the restaurant where the original argument had occurred, recalling, for the first time in a while, that Koehler had still never been brought in, Rosenzweig, by now the chief investigator for the Manhattan District Attorney, determined to finally close this case in his waning days on the job. This is an unusual kind of crime story. There's no mystery : we know who the culprit is in the first few pages. All the violence and most of the action takes place early on too. There's a little bit of courtroom drama, but it's mostly kept off stage. Instead, the book is mostly a profile of a few fascinating characters. Rosenzweig dominates the book's first half, a nearly perfect cop--honest, hardworking, and dedicated to the ideal of justice. It is his personal obsession with seeing that Koehler pays for the murder of Glennon that drives the story. He's kind of the positive version of Javert in Les Miserables. In the second half, with Koehler at last arrested and facing trial, it is the criminal who dominates. Frank Koehler, who had already done time for a murder he committed as a teenager, comes across as a cold-blooded killer, who, even now, in his 70s, contemplated shooting it out with the officers who came to arrest him in Penn Station or, before that, killing a cop a day until they agreed to stop pursuing him. In what Gourevitch says law enforcement officials consider a textbook depiction of the criminal mind, Koehler gives a videotaped confession in which he expresses no contrition about the original crime and seems to think he deserves credit for the killings he contemplated but didn't commit. But then, once he's imprisoned, Koehler shows a surprisingly spiritual side to his nature. Though Gourevitch, thankfully, never lets him off the hook for his violent past, he does show Koehler to be a more complex man than we might wish to believe. One particular facet of his personality that should give us all pause is that he appears to have modeled his behavior on that of characters in old gangster movies, like James Cagney. It makes you wonder what kids who learn their values from today's pop culture will be like. This latter part of the book introduces another interesting character, defense attorney Murray Richman. Amusingly free of any scruples about the work he does, representing admitted criminals, Richman provides some comic relief to the story and serves as kind of a moral bridge between the two main characters, straddling the line between the Law and the bad guys. Much of this first appeared in The New Yorker, for which Gourevitch is a staff writer, and it has the feel of a stretched out magazine piece, even if a superior one. I wouldn't have minded hearing more about all three of these men, but I suppose it's better to leave us wanting more than overstuffed. GRADE : A-

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