Three Percent #49: Two Books, One Rant

This week’s podcast is focused on crime and detective books—both fiction and nonfiction. First off, we talk I monologue about Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald and my recent Twitter fight with Joe McGinniss about this case, then we move on to talking about Wolf Haas’s Brenner and God and what makes this book (and detective books in general) fun to read.

I do apologize for the long diatribe about Joe McGinniss and Blind Vision, but after reading A Wilderness of Error and then coming across this article about the new trial, I was am a bit enraged at the smarmy way McGinniss is using this situation to his own benefit. As I explain in the podcast, McGinniss seems incapable of acknowledging that his book is part of the dominant discourse about this case, and that Morris’s much more comprehensive investigation illustrates the way in which we tend to interpret ambiguous facts (or ignore totally them) to fit the discourse/narrative we’ve decided to believe in. I think that Morris’s book makes it very clear that regardless of innocence or guilt, MacDonald did not receive a fair trial and that this is a travesty of justice. For McGinniss to use this situation to try and shill his book is really gross. Not just because of the fact he refers to MacDonald’s 40+ year imprisonment following the murder of his wife and two daughters as the “#FatalVision hearing,” but because it seems like he’s much more concerned with being “the truth” about MacDonald’s case rather than acknowledging that the man deserves a fair trial in one of the most compelling and strange mysteries of the past half-century . . .

/rant
/no more drunken tweeting

Anyway, this week’s music is In a Big City by Titus Andronicus—the best song from their new album.

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