Not long after Adam Lanza killed 26 people at Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut, Princeton professor Christy Wampole contributed to the New York Times an essay called “Guns and the Decline of the Young Man.” She argued that two previously valued social identities—whiteness and maleness—are on the wane, and what we’re seeing in incidents like the one in Newtown is a sort of death rattle. “Young men—and young white men in particular—have increasingly been asked to yield what they’d believed was securely theirs,” Wampole wrote. And they’re lashing out.
So this is more of a meditation, shorter on analysis than it is on simple thoughtfulness—indeed, on empathy. McConnell writes about six situations in which both murderers and victims were men. Where possible he interviews the killers in prison; in one case, which bears shades of Truman Capote, he professes admiration for Darrell Madden, a smart, articulate inmate whom McConnell calls “the rare double agent that ‘gay panic’ stories seem to beg for”: a gay porn actor turned skinhead who, with a friend, posed as a sex worker to lure and kill a gay man.
Karen Russell spins pain into parable in Vampires in the Lemon Grove.
In The Round House, Louise Erdrich settles for an easy target.
Dan Baum’s Gun Guys could use less Baum, more guys.
A conversation with Natalie Y. Moore and Lance Williams, authors of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation.
Plus: Short takes on new books by local authors.
