The Nutcracker

Rating:
Summary: A review of NUTCRACKER by Shana Alexander
Review: If you want to read an excellent, detailed and well written his tory of the Bradshaw family do not read this book. Instead read Jonathan Coleman's "At Mother's Request". This book needs alot of editing. The story is better told in chronological order, not by jumping around in time. The story of the murder of Franklin Bradshaw by his daughter, with his grandson acting as the "hit man" is a fascinating one. I just don't think that Ms. Alexander is a particularly capable writer. This book is both disorganized and overly speculative. Still, the story has no equal in its ability to hold your attention.

Rating:
Summary: A review of NUTCRACKER by Shana Alexander
Review: If you want to read an excellent, detailed and well written his tory of the Bradshaw family do not read this book. Instead read Jonathan Coleman's "At Mother's Request". This book needs alot of editing. The story is better told in chronological order, not by jumping around in time. The story of the murder of Franklin Bradshaw by his daughter, with his grandson acting as the "hit man" is a fascinating one. I just don't think that Ms. Alexander is a particularly capable writer. This book is both disorganized and overly speculative. Still, the story has no equal in its ability to hold your attention.

Rating:
Summary: Compare and contrast with Coleman
Review: It is unsurprising, perhaps, that so gripping a story as the killing of Franklin Bradshaw attracted the attention of more than one author.

What is surprising (to me) is that Shana Alexander's book has received so much more attention over the years than Jonathan Coleman's simultaneously-published account of the same facts. Coleman wrote AT MOTHER'S REQUEST (1985). I found it by far the more informative and gripping of the two accounts.

The authors relied on different sources. Alexander seems to have been very diligent in exhaustively interviewing members of this extremely dysfunctional family. But Coleman had better access to law enforcement sources, and so tells the story as a police, and prosecutorial, man (and woman) hunt.

The different sources and perspectives have many consequences.. For example, Alexander mentions at one point that Marc Schroeder's defense attorneys introduced into court a tape of his mother berating his sister (who was 6 years old and a budding ballerina, the inspiration for Alexander's title). Frances shrieks at the young girl in the most horrible way for her inability to spit out the complete definition of a sentence. "A sentence begins with a capital letter, expresses a complete thought, and ends with a period, exclamation point, or question mark," -- quite a mouthful to memorise at six!

As I say, Alexander mentions this tape, but we have to take her word for it that it shows Frances doing that. Coleman actually reproduces a substantial portion of the transcript of the tape for us, so we draw our own conclusion about Mom's abusiveness.

Both authors seem to have invented false names to protect the budding ballerina. Alexander calls her "Aradne" as I think I remember. Coleman calls her "Lavinia." If ever there was a good case for changing the name to protect the innocent, this is it! Still, we can draw the conclusion that she must have some multi-syllabic and classical//mythical name. She must be an adult by now of,course (2000). I wonder whether she grew up all right after all this and whether she had an adult ballet careeer and even what she is doing now.

Alexander wrote a decent book. But if you're only going to read one, read Coleman's.

Rating:
Summary: Compare and contrast with Coleman
Review: Oh boy. Just how much intense, stupid madness can one family harbor? The story reads like a parody of human behavior. Alexander's narrative, chuck full of detail and precise diction and some wonderful turns of phrase, often spirals into something like a long-running slapstick comedy too bizarre for television. The horror of neglect and greed, hatred, prejudice and violence are all here, but the form they take in this tale is so absurd sometimes that you have to laugh aloud at the sick antics.

The three most important characters are: Franklin Bradshaw, the miserly patriarch, apparently murdered by his grandsons at the insistence of his youngest daughter, Frances, an incredibly depraved creature nobody could have invented, and Berenice, mother of Frances and husband of Franklin, a slavish practitioner of "smotherly love." They hail from Utah where Franklin is a non-practicing Mormon. He has spent a lifetime of working sixteen hours a day and has, through his auto parts business and oil and land leases, amassed a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions of (1981) dollars. Frances and everybody else in the family would like to get their hands on the money, and each of them is deathly afraid that the others are scheming to cheat them out of their fair share, and they are. But Frances, the youngest of the four Bradshaw children, is particularly evil. She is the pretty baby of the family that no one could ever say no to, who always got away with everything as a child and expects that to continue. When the world says, "Whoa, child, no!" she fights back with every scheme and wile she can muster, committing nearly any and all crimes imaginable. She usually gets away with them because she has a quality about her that prevents anyone from saying no to her, at least anyone in her family. She is perhaps as neglectful a mother as one can imagine, physically beating and mentally torturing her children, using them as pawns in her wars with her two ex-husbands and her parents and sisters. She is an alcoholic, a drug addict, a paranoid schizophrenic, a bigot, a class-conscious low life, who hates blacks, Jews and poor white trash; a woman who is as trashy as one can get, yet a woman who manages to manipulate her mother and father and others so that she always has time to drink and whore around and send her children to private schools (even as she pushes them out the door in the morning in their underwear without breakfast or bath).

But enough. It's a good read, and I have to admire Alexander's writing ability. She makes it all very vivid and she does it with style and grace and without taking up some phony political position or presenting some shallow psychology. She sparkles the narrative with insight and bon mots and never slows down or bores.

Rating:
Summary: Charming
Review: Oh boy. Just how much intense, stupid madness can one family harbor? The story reads like a parody of human behavior. Alexander's narrative, chuck full of detail and precise diction and some wonderful turns of phrase, often spirals into something like a long-running slapstick comedy too bizarre for television. The horror of neglect and greed, hatred, prejudice and violence are all here, but the form they take in this tale is so absurd sometimes that you have to laugh aloud at the sick antics.

The three most important characters are: Franklin Bradshaw, the miserly patriarch, apparently murdered by his grandsons at the insistence of his youngest daughter, Frances, an incredibly depraved creature nobody could have invented, and Berenice, mother of Frances and husband of Franklin, a slavish practitioner of "smotherly love." They hail from Utah where Franklin is a non-practicing Mormon. He has spent a lifetime of working sixteen hours a day and has, through his auto parts business and oil and land leases, amassed a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions of (1981) dollars. Frances and everybody else in the family would like to get their hands on the money, and each of them is deathly afraid that the others are scheming to cheat them out of their fair share, and they are. But Frances, the youngest of the four Bradshaw children, is particularly evil. She is the pretty baby of the family that no one could ever say no to, who always got away with everything as a child and expects that to continue. When the world says, "Whoa, child, no!" she fights back with every scheme and wile she can muster, committing nearly any and all crimes imaginable. She usually gets away with them because she has a quality about her that prevents anyone from saying no to her, at least anyone in her family. She is perhaps as neglectful a mother as one can imagine, physically beating and mentally torturing her children, using them as pawns in her wars with her two ex-husbands and her parents and sisters. She is an alcoholic, a drug addict, a paranoid schizophrenic, a bigot, a class-conscious low life, who hates blacks, Jews and poor white trash; a woman who is as trashy as one can get, yet a woman who manages to manipulate her mother and father and others so that she always has time to drink and whore around and send her children to private schools (even as she pushes them out the door in the morning in their underwear without breakfast or bath).

But enough. It's a good read, and I have to admire Alexander's writing ability. She makes it all very vivid and she does it with style and grace and without taking up some phony political position or presenting some shallow psychology. She sparkles the narrative with insight and bon mots and never slows down or bores.

Rating:
Summary: Unsatisfying True Crime Saga
Review: Shana Alexander published her take on the by now notorious Francis Schreuder case in l985. In the same month of that year, Jonathan Coleman published his big, non-fiction study, "At Mother's Request," of the same shocking crime. Of the two, Coleman's book far surpasses Alexander's on several levels. Coleman appears to have interviewed and investigated every major and minor figure involved in this case where a psychopathic mother orders her son to kill her wealthy, plain-living father. More importantly, he includes lots of dramatic photographs of the murderous Mom, her two psychotic sons and the major players in this bigger-than-life tragedy. Alexander doesn't include a single photograph. She and a few other true crime writers appear to have this lofty idea that pictures should be included in lurid, paperback true-crime stories only because books like her's are too big and important to cater to the plebians. I keep harping on this lack of pictures because I think it greatly dilutes a major source of information and enjoyment for readers. Your imagination can only fill in the blanks so far. I dearly love to curl up with a big, thick nonfiction crime book and Coleman's is the one you'll find me with on a wintry weekend. Alexander's book is okay but unsatisfying. Yet, it was her book that became the source of a wildly popular TV miniseries back in the 80s.