Baseball

“I wrote 63 songs this year. They’re all about Jeter.” Just kidding. The game we love, the players we hate, and more.

Culture and Criticism

From Norman Mailer to Wendy Pepper — everything on film, TV, books, music, and snacks (shut up, raisins), plus the Girls’ Bike Club.

Donors Choose and Contests

Helping public schools, winning prizes, sending a crazy lady in a tomato costume out in public.

Stories, True and Otherwise

Monologues, travelogues, fiction, and fart humor. And hens. Don’t forget the hens.

The Vine

The Tomato Nation advice column addresses your questions on etiquette, grammar, romance, and pet misbehavior. Ask The Readers about books or fashion today!

Home » Culture and Criticism

The Most Evil Women in History

Submitted by on August 3, 2009 – 4:27 PM9 Comments

marie-hilley-0The hilarious cover art and dryly blunt title got my hopes up — in vain, alas.   The writing is not awful, but Shelley Klein can’t decide if she’s going to report these cases straight, offer wisecracks, or make commentary, and the result is a dullish goulash of all three.

If I’d skipped the prologue, I might have enjoyed the rest of the book more, but Klein’s introduction reads like a first-draft attempt at applying a women’s-studies overarching principle to the proceedings, and the way she’s chosen to group the various femonsters is not insightful enough to warrant a two-page explanation.

Various works cited have value, if readers want a less cursory and disorganized look at any of the evil women in question, but the book works best as a gag gift, left unopened.

Share!
Pin Share


Tags:    

9 Comments »

  • Margaret in CO says:

    Here, hon: http://tinyurl.com/ddqln7
    (crimelibrary dot com’s “Women who Kill” section.

  • Sandman says:

    I don’t know about Most Evil in History, but that hair looks fairly reprehensible.

  • Sarah D. Bunting says:

    Bembenek is in there? I thought it was understood that she hadn’t done it after all; she just pled it on time served so she could stop, you know, breaking out of prison to protest her innocence.

  • Margaret in CO says:

    I was surprised to see Bambi in there also – but I couldn’t get to her story, just went into a linkloop. They have yet to vacate her sentence, so I guess she still qualifies.

  • Jaybird says:

    Oh, dear. You know, maybe I’m naive, but if you’d already been in and out of prison more than a laundry truck, wouldn’t you at least TRY to steer clear of drugs and other legally-dodgy things? (Not debating the wisdom of drugs being illegal; I’m just saying, do you really want MORE trouble?)

    And…well, did anyone ever look into that whole Dr. Phil/false imprisonment issue? Because Bembenek seems to be at least half a bobble off plumb, but again, Dr. Phil.

  • Margaret in CO says:

    Yikes indeed! Damn.

  • RJ says:

    She leaves out the Countess of Bathory, but includes Catherine the Great (I read a fascinating bio of the Empress Catherine – it would seem she was very much wronged by historians!!)??

    Did this woman actually bother to do any research, or did she get everything from Wikipedia?

  • liz says:

    Ha! I actually bought this book on the discount-discount table a few months back – needless to say, I was…..underwhelmed. I actually thought perhaps the book was a bad translation from some other language, but didn’t care enough to look into it.

Leave a comment!

Please familiarize yourself with the Tomato Nation commenting policy before posting.
It is in the FAQ. Thanks, friend.

You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>