Regular marked price: $16.95Discount Price: $13.56
Cost Savings: $3.39 (20%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 364
EAN num: 9780470223567
ISBN number: 0470223561
Label: Jossey-Bass
Manufacturer: Jossey-Bass
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 496
Printing Date: February 04, 2008
Publishing house: Jossey-Bass
Sale Popularity Level: 735075
Studio: Jossey-Bass
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
On Mother's Day night, 2004, award-winning fourth grade teacher Nancy Seaman left the Tudor home she shared with her husband of thirty two years in the gated community of Farmington Hills, near Detroit, Michigan, and drove in a driving rain storm to Home Depot, to purchase a hatchet.
Three days later, police discovered the mutilated body of Bob Seaman - a successful auto industry engineer, softball coach and passionate collector of vintage Mustangs - in the back of the family's Ford Explorer. As the shackles were placed on her wrists, Nancy Seaman asserted that her husband had been beating her, and she'd killed him in self-defense.
At her trial, two radically different stories emerged. One of the couple's sons, Greg, testified that his father had been abusing his mother for years. The other, Jeff, testified for the prosecution, charging his mother as a cold blooded killer.
Joyce Maynard's chilling work delves beyond the events of the crime itself, to explore the lives of an American family who seemed to have everything. Her exploration of the story led to a year's research in suburban Detroit - but the story she found there will take the reader to the Depression-era farm country of Illinois, the working class neighborhoods of the auto industry in its heyday and even, surprisingly, to a Baptist church in burned-out downtown Detroit. Along the way we meet a Transylvanian forensic pathologist, a beautiful young prosecutor, an old-school police chief, a television news crew hungry for ratings, the softball scorekeeper mom accused of carrying on an affair with the murdered man, and her two shell shocked teenagers, still reeling from the death of their beloved coach, and a mother who has to tell her daughter why her favorite teacher won't be in school any more.
As in Joyce Maynard's previous books - including To Die For, based on a true crime, and her best selling memoir, At Home in the World - Joyce Maynard's themes here involve family secrets, the deep fissures that lie below the surface of the glittering exteriors, and the deep, potentially fatal, fissures in the American Dream.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
I purchased this book after hearing the author on Fresh Air. It appealed to me because I used to live in Farmington, Michigan, which is subsequent to the city where Nancy and Bob Seaman lived. I also wondered not only why Nancy Seaman murdered her husband but why she did it so violently.
The book is a page turner. I'm usually a slow reader but I finished it quickly. The short chapters help to maintain momentum. Maynard's style also keeps the tempo going. Some of her interviews and observations do give a flavor of the people and places of the story and the Detroit area.
However, the book has fatal flaws (pardon the pun). The worst of these is Maynard's decision to insinuate herself into the story. The book becomes almost as much of an exercise in therapeutic self-exploration as a true crime story.
Maynard clearly takes sides in this story. She writes of the people she likes, such as Lisa Ortleib (now Gorcyca) and Detective Al Patterson, with near reverence. Those she doesn't like seem like cartoon characters. The same facile approach that makes the book easy to read also gives it a television-like tendency to oversimplify.
Maynard also makes abundant mistakes of fact (saying that Telegraph Road runs through Grosse Pointe, calling Dodge Magnums Plymouths, misspelling Tigers shortstop Alan Trammell's name, etc.). This made me wonder whether her sloppiness extended to pertinent parts of the story, too.
In the end, I was disappointed. This was a story that deserved to be told in all its complexity. Maynard captured some of it. However, she could have told it better if she had kept herself off of the pages and abstained from quick and easy generalization.
Rated by buyers -
First part of the book is interesting until the trial is over.
Then the after the trial the rest of the book is tedious and somewhat boring.
Rated by buyers -
Author Joyce Maynard does a terrific job of recreating this fascinating true-crime story: of an award-winning school teacher, Nancy Seaman, who butchered her husband, tried to hide his body and then tried to use the battered wife syndrome as her defense. The killer comes across as arrogant, cold, manipulative and repulsive. Instead of her being the battered wife, it appears her husband was the actual battered victim. The way the killer tries to adopt the personae of a battered woman is repulsive and enrages the reader. One of her sons, Greg, appears pathologically incapable of seeing his mother as a vicious killer, while his brother, Jeff, sees her as a cold-blooded murderess whose attempts to persuade him and her friends at school that she was the victim of a heartless wife beater are hysterical. Whenever she bruised herself, she would go around touting the bruise as just one piece of evidence that she is being beaten. Where I had problems with the book is when the author heavily interweaves her own life of marital problems into the mix, as if trying to justify her fascination with this case. She spends much too much time describing her failure to attain interviews with Greg and his killer Mom and other friends and enemies of the Seaman family. Jeff comes across as a boor who continuously stands up the author for scheduled interviews. Sometimes an author can step into the story and enhance it, if it adds another dimension to it--much like what Jim Schutze did in his fascinating study of judicial lynching in BY TWO BY TWO. This is when twin sisters were accused of murdering the dentist husband of one and the charges of a psychopathic, alcoholic drug addict were used to railroad one sister into prison for life, while the other one was acquitted. But in INTERNAL COMBUSTION, the author's personal intrusion into a fascinating study of evil dampens the effect of the story. I'd like to see what Ann Rule or Jim Schutze would have done with this true life tragedy.
Rated by buyers -
What do you do when you set out to write a true crime book, but the perp won't talk, even though you've invested a lot of time and money in the faith that she will? Well, this book shows how to get around that major problem. You pad it. Pad it with observations about everything you did while waiting around for the key interview that won't ever happen. You attend the funeral of a Four Tops singer. What's that got to do with Nancy Seaman? Nada. You hang out at the lake house of the local courthouse reporter and pad a few chapters about that. You decide you'll draw parallels with your own failed marriage and divorce. That's good for maybe 25 percent of the required pages to make your book contract. Hmm. Let's see, now? What else can you pad with? Oh, I know. Make some big socioeconomic generalizations about the haves and have nots who populate both sides of the tracks in your setting, in this case, Detroit's 8 Mile Road. Even so, this book is still pretty interesting and Maynard is a world-class writer. So you should read it, even though it's deeply flawed. The case in question is a real beaut.
Rated by buyers 
-
Both as a "what-made-her-do-it?" investigation and as a searing cultural and family study of 3 generations of Detroit-area auto engineering people, Maynard relentlessly digs for truth and understanding of murderous rage that destroyed a prosperous family. I stayed up all night two nights in a row to finish it and was sad to see it end, but the book forced me to think hard about the catastrophic violence waiting to explode in so many feuding families -- and what causes the explosions to occur, as well as the consequences for the survivors. Regardless of how tranquil your world, you will be shaken by the story of what may have caused an award-winning 4th grade teacher to take a hatchet to her husband's head. The author's intermittent reflections on her own fascination with the story add extra poignancy and mirrored many of the questions I was asking myself about this fascinating case study of a seeming typical American upper middle class family. A real treasure.
Find other books like this one:
