Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“In order to keep him alive, we have had to forget his victims.”

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

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In 1888 an unknown man became famous. His fame carried on over the decades and then centuries. Not for anything good, not for changing the world for the better, but for his violent murders. There have been countless books written about this shadowy figure. Comics, songs, films and TV series. There are museums and tours in his name. The mystery of his identity is still being investigated today. But his victims have not received the same kind of attention. Instead they have been pushed aside, […]

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

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This, as many other reviewers have noted, is really not a book about Jack the Ripper. He barely comes into it at all, which certainly seems to be the author’s intention. Instead, she focuses all her time on researching the lives of his five most likely victims. Each woman and her family has an entire section devoted solely to her story. “It is for them that I write this book. I do so in the hope that we may now hear their stories clearly and […]

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

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What a great book! I don’t know what else to say except Rubenhold does such a great job of giving us a full picture of the five women who were murdered by Jack the Ripper. She goes in the order of the murders, with each section focusing on them from birth to death. She skips over their brutal murders and instead shows us how they lived, how they loved, and how many people were quick to blame these women and in some cases characterize them. […]

No, they weren’t all prostitutes

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

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The popular narrative is that Jack the Ripper stalked and murdered five prostitutes in Victorian London. The story has always been about him and his mystery, a sensationalized true crime tale meant to scandalize and, at the time, act as a bit of a warning – be a good girl, and he won’t come for you. With The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, Hallie Rubenhold seeks to rectify this by removing him from the story almost entirely. Instead, she […]



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