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The case of Jack the Rip­per is one of the world’s most endur­ing unsolved mys­ter­ies. Dur­ing the 120 years or so since the killer claimed his first vic­tim, there has been almost con­stant spec­u­la­tion as to his iden­tity. Doc­tors and sur­geons have always made pop­u­lar sus­pects, as some of the vic­tims are thought to have been dis­sected or dis­mem­bered with some skill. Other the­o­ries have sug­gested Eng­lish nobles. petty theives, “insane” per­sons, and even Joseph (not John) Mer­rick — the Ele­phant Man — as the killer.

In this 2002 book, Patri­cia Corn­well details her inves­ti­ga­tions of and con­clu­sions about the case. She has, for the first time, brought mod­ern foren­sic tech­niques to bear on the case. Lit­tle phys­i­cal evi­dence remains, but she sub­jects what there is (let­ters, mostly) to DNA, mito­chon­dr­ial DNA, paper, water­mark, ink, and hand­writ­ing analy­sis. She uses the result­ing evi­dence to link Wal­ter Sick­ert, a British painter of Ger­man extrac­tion, to the crimes. With this evi­den­tial con­nec­tion estab­lished, Corn­well uses a great deal of cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence to bol­ster her case.
Among many other things, Sick­ert often painted and drew very dark and men­ac­ing pieces, and Corn­well sees par­al­lels between some of these and the Ripper;s vic­tims or crimes. She cites the fact that Sick­ert, a for­mer actor, was a mas­ter of dis­guise, and that he would often dis­ap­pear for days into one of a num­ber of secret stu­dios he kept in the seed­ier sec­tions of London.

Corn­well also argues against some basic sup­po­si­tions of the Rip­per case. At the time of the mur­ders, hun­dreds of let­ters were sent to the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police, claim­ing to be from the killer. Most of these have long been con­sid­ered to be fakes. Corn­well posits instead that the vari­a­tions in hand­writ­ing among the let­ters would have been easy for a skilled artist like Sick­ert to fake, and that sim­i­lar­i­ties in writ­ing style and paper types mean that a large num­ber of the let­ters are actu­ally from the killer. She also dis­agrees with the idea that the Rip­per appeared, killed a hand­ful of women, and then dis­ap­peared again. She iden­ti­fies one mur­der that took place prior to the acknowl­edged Rip­per killings and a num­ber that occurred after them as the work of the same per­son — Wal­ter Sickert.

Por­trait of a Killer is com­pelling, but as Corn­well her­self admits, most of her evi­dence is cir­cum­stan­tial. It appears — at least from the orga­ni­za­tion of the book — that she set out to answer the ques­tion “Was Wal­ter Sick­ert Jack the Rip­per?” rather than the ques­tion “Who was Jack the Rip­per?” As such, it comes off as more of an inves­ti­ga­tion of Sick­ert than of the Rip­per. The evi­dence, as Corn­well presents it, shows that the artist could have been the killer — not that he was, and not that any of the other sus­pects weren’t.

Much of what has been writ­ten about the fast food indus­try in recent years has focused on how unhealth­ful the food is and the industry’s pre­sumed link to the rise of obe­sity in this coun­try. While Eric Schlosser touches on this, his exam­i­na­tion of fast food goes far deeper. Schlosser details the his­tory of the indus­try, trac­ing it to its ori­gins in south­ern Cal­i­for­nia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He sees the con­cept of fast food as purely a prod­uct of post-WWII Amer­i­can cul­ture: squeaky-clean restau­rants using assem­bly line or auto­mated prepa­ra­tion meth­ods, pro­vid­ing almost instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion to the rapidly-growing pop­u­la­tion of car owners.

Schlosser goes on to show how inti­mately the fast food indus­try has been con­nected to var­i­ous eco­nomic, social, and indus­trial devel­op­ments over the last sixty years. The prac­tice of busi­ness fran­chis­ing — in which a com­pany licenses its name, busi­ness plan, and pro­ce­dures to indi­vid­ual entre­pre­neurs, thus cre­at­ing uni­for­mity of prod­ucts and demand­ing uni­for­mity of sup­plies — is an inven­tion of the fast food indus­try. He also links fast food to such things as the rise of mono­cul­ture, the indus­tri­al­iza­tion of meat pro­cess­ing, the low national min­i­mum wage, and the increased use of processed and arti­fi­cial ingre­di­ents and flavorings.

Although Schlosser spends most of his time exam­in­ing what he (and I) see as detri­men­tal effects of the fast food indus­try, he does find a sil­ver lin­ing. He dis­cusses some good things the indus­try has accom­plished, and sin­gles out some com­pa­nies (such as In-N-Out Burger, one of my favorites) that buck indus­try trends. This book is a fas­ci­nat­ing read, but I wouldn’t rec­om­mend it if you plan to con­tinue eat­ing fast food with any regularity.

Anthony Bour­dain pulls no punches in this mem­oir of his life­time in the restau­rant indus­try. He sets out to describe what the peo­ple who toil behind swing­ing kitchen doors are really like, explic­itly point­ing out the dif­fer­ences between them and squeaky-clean TV chefs — or at least their on-screen per­sonas. Bour­dain details his rise through the culi­nary world, from a teenaged dish­washer in a coastal Mass­a­chu­setts tourist town to the Culi­nary Insti­tute of America-trained Exec­u­tive Chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York. His ascent was far from smooth — inex­pe­ri­ence, drug addic­tion, crazy emplo­erys and employ­ees, and run-ins with orga­nized crime all took their toll. But for Bour­dain, cook­ing — really food — is an all-consuming pas­sion, and he seems able to bounce back from anything.

Beyond being a gritty mem­oir, Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial offers a great deal of insight into how pro­fes­sional kitchens and restau­rants in gen­eral func­tion. Bour­dain explains on which days of the weeks var­i­ous food items are gen­er­ally fresh­est, which dishes typ­i­cally have the high­est mark-ups, what menu items to avoid, and what sorts of spe­cial requests tend to piss cooks off. He also offers advice on kitchen tools, gar­nish­ing meth­ods, and ingre­di­ent selec­tion for the ama­teur cook hop­ing to emu­late fancy restau­rant techniques.

Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial is a very inter­est­ing read, if one can get past Bourdain’s blus­tery tone, salty lan­guage, and some­times unsa­vory doings. He is a good writer, despite these things, and his intel­li­gence and whit often shine through, mak­ing this a book that’s hard to set down.