Three Weeks in October

Book review, sort of. On the plane to LA, I tried reading Three Weeks in October. If any book had a hope of captivating me, this should have been it. It's the story of the sniper who shot thirteen people in suburban Maryland near Washington DC. Many of the deaths were within two or three miles of my mother's house, and most of them are in places I'm totally familiar with. The snipers were captured at a freeway rest area where I stop frequently.

So I should have loved the book, right? The author, Charles Moose, was the police captain who cracked the case, so he should have known everything there was to know.

I got 48 pages into it before I got tired. OK—I was trying to read on a cross country flight in the economy section of a six-abreast plane. (But I did finish a Harry Potter and half of another book that way.)

Three Weeks, unfortunately, commits two sins. It's an "as told to" book, and the real author, Charles Fleming, should have known better. But anyhow, it focuses on the trivia. Who cares whether the Moose's brother got into trouble with the law when Moose was a child? Who cares what sort of gun he carries when he's doing a press conference? I cared a LOT about the crime and its investigation, but I got bogged down in his personal history.

As if that isn't enough, the style is choppy and disorganized, something I'd have trouble allowing in my Freshman Comp students. Example from page 42 (about as far as I was able to get)

My brother David was the firstborn in my family. He was born in New York. I was born in New York, too, four years later. Shortly after that, my father decided to move back to the South.

It doesn't take much writing like that to discourage the reader—even one who really wants to read the book.