Culture

She Became a Private Eye. And Investigated Her Past.

Published

3 years ago

March 16, 2022

She Became a Private Eye. And Investigated Her Past.

TELL ME EVERYTHING
The Story of a Personal Investigation
By Erika Krouse

In 2002, Erika Krouse made the fateful determination to succeed in for a Paul Auster novel. Her hand met that of a person reaching for a similar e book, and the 2 struck up a dialog. As Krouse describes it, the flexibility to attract folks out has adopted her round her entire life; it has, she says, one thing to do along with her face. After telling her issues that he had “by no means informed anybody,” the person, a lawyer, employed her on the spot to be his personal investigator.

With none actual coaching, Krouse’s first few assignments went badly. Then she was referred to as in on a brand new case. “It’s rape,” the lawyer mentioned. “School rape, gang rape. That OK with you?” An advanced query for anybody, however for Krouse, herself a sufferer of childhood sexual abuse, painfully so.

The case is centered on the college’s soccer group, gamers, coaches and recruits. That story, and the fallout from Krouse’s personal sexual abuse, turn into the dual threads that compose this fantastically written, disturbing and affecting memoir. That is literary nonfiction at a excessive stage. Followers of true crime may be upset within the eccentricities of the author, who commonly finds purpose to element, say, drought situations in Colorado, as a substitute of giving a simple accounting of crimes and cover-ups. A observe lets readers know that particulars and timelines have been modified, and whereas occasions clearly happen in Boulder, no precise names are used. The e book swirls round main sexual problems with our day — consent, faculty rape tradition, institutional accountability — with out ever feeling preachy or didactic.

As an alternative, we get lovely sentences that leap out of nowhere. Her day by day drive: “/:“ I’d unroll my home windows to odor the city, the moist or dusty filth alive with pine needles, animal droppings, useless bugs and aspen leaves. Within the winter the city smelled like snow.” Of climate: “My toes had been chilly, my lungs had been chilly, and the weepy damp crawled down my shirt and up the legs of my pants.”

In detailing her personal trauma, Krouse is unsparing. The abuse began when she was a toddler, and her later makes an attempt to acquire assist from her mom had been — echoing the college rape case — ignored and rebuffed. Romantic and familial relationships endure. She struggles along with her boyfriend (and eventual husband), brother and sister. I discovered myself gasping at some moments involving her mom, the ache heightened by tenderness.

There are occasional false moments, too. The writer typically drops into hard-boiled noir tropes — “Knees, neck, eyes,” she tells the lawyer when he sends her to speak to 1 soccer participant: “Everybody has weaknesses” — that really feel at odds with the tone of the e book. And sometimes the story reads like a creation fantasy for a hero P.I. As an investigator myself, I objected to the notion that we simply present up and, by way of some mystical accident of physiognomy, get folks to spill their guts. (Perhaps I simply lack a magic face.) My guess is that it’s Krouse’s listening, the standard of her deep consideration, that will get folks speaking. She definitely conveys the emotional realities of the job: the narcotic thrill of a great interview, the exhilaration of dirty conditions, the fixed niggling feeling of being a bully, a manipulator, a liar.

At first, I apprehensive that the twin narratives of Krouse’s private story and the soccer group’s rape case wouldn’t coalesce. Sadly, they match collectively all too effectively: “I hadn’t been attempting to show a rape case to a bunch of white males in black robes who didn’t matter to me,” Krouse writes. “I had been attempting to show it to my mom.”

Culture

Ben Shelton slams ‘embarrassing and disrespectful’ interviews by Australian Open broadcasters

Published

1 hour ago

January 22, 2025

Press Room

Ben Shelton slams ‘embarrassing and disrespectful’ interviews by Australian Open broadcasters

MELBOURNE, Australia — Ben Shelton, the 22-year-old American who made the Australian Open semifinals Wednesday with a win over Lorenzo Sonego, added his voice to the chorus of players who have been critical of the broadcasters and on-court interviewers in his post-match news conference.

“I’ve been a little bit shocked this week with how players have been treated by the broadcasters,” Shelton said.

He topped his list of complaints with Tony Jones, the Channel 9 sportscaster, who taunted Serbian fans, called Novak Djokovic names and yelled “kick him out” on air. It was an apparent reference to Djokovic being deported from Australia two years ago over Covid-19 protocols.

Jones apologized on the air, saying that he “overstepped the mark,” after Djokovic called his comments “insulting and offensive.” He had refused to do on-court interviews until he received the apology.

“I don’t think that was just a single event,” Shelton said. “I’ve noticed it with different people, not just myself.”

He mentioned American Learner Tien’s on-court interview, a stilted conversation at 3 a.m. in which an exhausted and dazed Tien, 19, became the object of some mocking when two questions left him a bit speechless after nearly five hours of tennis in the middle of the night. He had just knocked out Daniil Medvedev, the No. 5 seed.

“19 year olds aren’t meant to be that good,” the interviewer, John Fitzgerald, said. Then he asked Tien if he had ever heard of his next opponent, Corentin Moutet.

“I noticed it with Learner Tien in one of his matches,” Shelton said. “I think when he beat Medvedev, his post-match interview. I thought it was kind of embarrassing and disrespectful.”

Shelton then turned to his own experiences. After his fourth-round win over Gael Monfils, the interviewer said to Shelton that Monfils could be his father. Monfils is Black, as is Shelton, who responded, “is that a Black joke?”

He later said he did not think the interviewer meant any malice in the comment, but that it still made him uncomfortable.

“There are some comments that have been made to me in post-match interviews by a couple of different guys. Today on the court, ‘hey, Ben, how does it feel that no matter who you play in your next match, no one is going to be cheering for you?’

“I mean, may be true, but I just don’t think the comment is respectful from a guy I’ve never met before in my life.”

Shelton said he felt the broadcasters and interviewers were not doing a good enough job promoting tennis.

“I feel like broadcasters should be helping us grow our sport and help these athletes who just won matches on the biggest stage enjoy one of their biggest moments. I feel like there’s just been a lot of negativity. I think that’s something that needs to change.”

Tennis Australia was not immediately able to respond to Shelton’s comments.

(Nick Denholm / Getty Images)

Culture

Winter Books to Read When It’s Cold Outside

Published

9 hours ago

January 22, 2025

Press Room

Winter Books to Read When It’s Cold Outside

Frigid storms, heaps of snow and subzero temperatures are not exactly pleasant to live through, but winter weather can make for an irresistible setting for a book. From the cool surface of a frozen lake to the dizzying frenzy of a white-out squall, the dead of winter offers countless evocative and extreme conditions that conjure magic, channel heartbreak and push characters to their limits. The long nights and biting cold also make easy grist for atmosphere: Even in the coziest of reading nooks, the wintry chill can seem to leap from the very best winter books’ pages, making you clutch your mug of tea a little closer.

As we slog through the January doldrums and temperatures in much of the United States dip to polar levels, it can help to embrace the spirit of the season. Here are 10 books that feel ice-cold from the first page.

By Heather Gudenkauf

When the true crime writer Wylie Lark discovers an unconscious child outside her remote cabin in rural Iowa, she becomes embroiled in a mystery worthy of one of her macabre books. But the real terror comes from the elements, as an unrelenting winter storm traps Lark and the child inside. Gudenkauf weaves together three stories across three time periods in this unsettling and sometimes brutal thriller. As the threads converge, you can practically feel the bitter winds lashing against the cabin walls.

Read our review.

By Naomi Novik

“I could see nothing but winter, all around,” Miryem, one of the narrators of Novik’s glorious fantasy novel observes as she is swept into the icy kingdom of the powerful, fae-like Staryk. Billed as a retelling of “Rumpelstiltskin,” this Hugo Award nominee is in fact an uncanny blend of several Eastern European fairy tales, myths and legends, remixed in a style that feels wholly original. In this novel, it isn’t just the weather that can turn cold: “Thrice you shall turn silver to gold for me,” the Staryk king threatens Miryem, “or be changed to ice yourself.”

Read our review.

By Taylor Adams

This thrilling novel opens on a Colorado highway in the middle of a blizzard, and the weather only worsens from there. Adams uses the harsh conditions to sequester his cast of suspicious strangers inside a secluded service station without Wi-Fi or cell service, setting the stage for a classic locked-room mystery. When Darby Thorne, a college student, discovers a possible kidnapping victim in one of the vehicles parked at the rest stop, she has to determine which of her fellow stranded travelers is responsible — all while waiting for the storm to relent and the roads to be cleared.

By James Salter

One of the great American adventure novels, “Solo Faces” follows the daring exploits of Verne Rand, a self-reliant roofer who absconds from California to the Swiss Alps. There, he commits himself to the monumental task of scaling some of the most imposing mountains in the world, including the Eiger, the Grandes Jorasses and the Aiguille du Dru. Salter renders these treacherous ascents in spartan, crystalline prose, finding in the death-defying thrills of mountaineering something like a religious experience. It’s a beautiful book, with writing as icy as the alpine peaks.

Read our review.

By Darcy Coates

A group of tourists, stranded in an abandoned cabin during a snowstorm, wake up after their first bitterly cold night in the woods to find their tour guide butchered, and his severed head impaled on the branch of a tree. That’s the grisly setup for this violent, claustrophobic parlor mystery, which reads like a slasher version of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None.” The body count is high, the murders are inventive and the gore is vivid, but it’s the snow that gets top billing, surrounding the characters on all sides as the tension mounts and the blood continues to pour.

Read our review.

By John Williams

A western concerned with the demise of the American West, “Butcher’s Crossing,” by the cult-favorite author of “Stoner,” tells the story of an ill-fated 1870s buffalo hunt in the Colorado Rockies that is disrupted by the sudden onset of a winter storm. The book’s hero is Will Andrews, an idealistic college student, who gets lured into this folly by an ambitious, fortune-seeking hunter named Miller. The novel’s unromantic naturalism, as well as its grim view of American exceptionalism and frontier hubris, draws frequent comparisons to Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” but the despairing winter chill that pervades the story is distinctly its own.

Read our review.

By Claire Keegan

Keegan’s short, bittersweet book is set in Ireland over the Christmas holidays of 1985, and she makes you feel the season’s every errant gust and snowflake as the protagonist, the unassuming Bill Furlong, makes his rounds delivering the village’s coal each morning. When Furlong discovers the disturbing secrets hidden within the cloistered walls of the local convent — to describe them any further would ruin the mystery — he’s put in an impossible position, left to determine whether he can summon a measure of warmth for his fellow man amid the dreary Irish landscape.

Read our review, and listen to our editors discuss the novel on the Book Review podcast.

By Stephen King

Written in the aftermath of a car accident that left him needing months of physical rehabilitation, King’s underrated “Dreamcatcher” feels very much like the work of a man in pain — the agony manifesting, in typical King fashion, as a ruthless alien parasite that gestates in the lower intestines of its victims before bursting out of their backsides. The book’s heroes, a quartet of lifelong friends from King’s favored town of Derry, contend with the alien invaders in the woods of Maine amid an overwhelming blizzard, which gives the story its suitably chilling backdrop.

By Owen Beattie and John Geiger

In “Frozen in Time,” the Canadian authors Beattie and Geiger delve into the longstanding mystery of the Franklin Expedition, a failed 19th-century voyage in search of the Northwest Passage that left two British ships, the Erebus and the Terror, stranded in the Arctic ice and their entire crews dead. Beattie and Geiger capture the excitement and peril of the explorers’ harrowing journey through polar conditions and, drawing on comprehensive forensic research, offer a compelling explanation of what might have transpired over their final weeks and days (including, in a final act of desperation, cannibalism). It’s a serious historical work, but also a riveting account of a truly extraordinary expedition.

By Dan Simmons

If the true story of the Franklin Expedition isn’t quite exciting enough, you may prefer “The Terror,” Simmons’s fictionalized dramatization that turns the real-life Arctic voyage into a larger-than-life battle with the supernatural. Beattie and Geiger’s research suggests that the crews of the Erebus and the Terror may have suffered from hallucinations after contracting lead poisoning from spoiled tinned provisions. Simmons cleverly folds this fact into his thriller, in which his cast of sailors must fight a bloodthirsty monster while also gradually going insane.

Read our review. And if you’re still hungry for more Franklin Expedition fare, you might also enjoy AMC’s series adaptation of Simmons’s book, or Kaliane Bradley’s romance novel “The Ministry of Time,” in which one of the explorers, Graham Gore, is plucked from the ice and transported to the future.

Culture

‘Everybody listens’: Nick Saban caps a significant rookie season on ESPN

Published

17 hours ago

January 22, 2025

Press Room

‘Everybody listens’: Nick Saban caps a significant rookie season on ESPN

The Worldwide Leader in Employing Former Coaches and Players has made many prominent hires over the years, but Nick Saban slots into a class of his own.

Multiple eras of ESPN management never hid their desire to bring Saban into their orbit, and I remember reporting an item in August 2014 on Saban’s wowing ESPN staffers during a long conversation at The Langham Hotel in Pasadena, Calif., the day before the national championship game. The NFL is ESPN’s most important property, but in many ways, college sports make ESPN go.

Saban, represented forever by CAA, the talent agency that essentially has an office in ESPN’s headquarters in Bristol, Conn., clearly was intrigued by broadcasting, and ESPN finally landed its man last February. Think of Tommy Lee Jones chasing Harrison Ford in “The Fugitive,” except this story ends with Ford getting a multimillion-dollar deal to talk college football.

Saban was in the middle of the “College GameDay” set Monday night in Atlanta as part of a two-hour pregame show. He also pulled halftime duties. The iconic show now centers around Pat McAfee, who brings energy and unpredictability, and Saban, who has been charged with bringing gravitas.

Saban has delivered that in his opening year. Monday night in Atlanta, he offered a nice piece of copy early in the pregame:

“The most important thing in games like this is who can keep the main thing the main thing,” Saban said. “There’s a lot more disruptions when you are playing in a national championship game. You travel at a different time. You practice in a different place. You have more media obligations. Everybody has won three big games. Both teams won a big game last week.

“How do they handle the whole idea of, ‘Am I relieved that we got to this point or am I going to go get the gold?’ People remember the ‘Miracle On Ice.’ We beat Russia, and that was like what everybody remembers. We had to go beat Finland the next week (Editor’s note: It was actually two days later) to win the gold medal. Somebody has to step up tonight and win the gold medal.”

What GameDay lacked for a couple of years was someone right off the field, whether a player or coach, and that’s where Saban has been significant. Broadcasters do not impact viewership outside of a rare few (maybe Howard Cosell and Charles Barkley), and I’m not sure Saban falls in this category, but the data is the data: “College GameDay” averaged 2.2 million viewers during the regular season, its most-watched season ever and a 6 percent increase from 2023.

Jim Gaiero, who has been the lead producer of “College GameDay” for the past nine years, said he was intimidated by Saban when the former Alabama coach first joined the show.

“Just because he’s Nick Saban,” Gaiero said. “I didn’t really know him that well. I thought he would be that same coach who’s yelling at Lane Kiffin and demanding perfection in everything we do. I was definitely intimidated. Now he busts my chops more than any human being. I am his punching bag, and it’s fun. He’s very funny and a ball-buster.

“He was always good on TV, and when the camera’s on, he’s on. So it was about learning things like how do you introduce a point that leads to an XO tape, or where you direct yourself during a conversation.

“I remember early in the season I was talking to him, and I said, ‘If you are going to go to Dez (Desmond Howard) next, make sure you’re looking at Dez.’ He’s like, ‘Well, why didn’t you tell me this before?!’ I was like, ‘Well, I didn’t want to give you everything at once.’ We’ve added stuff each week, and he’s grown so much since the beginning of the season.

“The thing is, whenever he makes a comment, everybody listens. He doesn’t have throwaway comments. There are some analysts who tend to repeat what their co-analysts just said. It’s almost like an echo. But when he speaks, it’s a unique perspective that nobody else has ever had.”

It is very intentional to place Saban in the middle of the set, as opposed to an end, because Gaiero said it is easier for the other panelists to interact with him. (You don’t want newcomers on the edge of a set because it makes it tougher for them to get acclimated to the conversation.) Gaiero said GameDay benefited from Saban’s already knowing all its on-air members before becoming one.

“The best moments for our chemistry are the Friday meetings because Nick will tell a few stories, and everyone is on the edge of their seats listening,” Gaiero said. “It can be as silly as a recruiting story or the time he played at this stadium. He tells the story, and we’re all laughing, and he’s laughing and smiling. He’s like, ‘I don’t know if you guys want that on the show,’ and we’re all like, ‘My God, that’s definitely in the show!’”

Gaiero said Saban’s best moments this year were his “nothing” speech from October and when he discussed changing his coaching style from transactional to transformative. (They submitted the latter for the Sports Emmy nomination process.)

The next evolution for Saban, according to Gaiero, is to refine his preparation process. The producer wants him to talk to as many coaches as he can during the offseason and, of course, watch tape.

The program would be wise in Year 2 to dial back on the genuflecting of Saban. His resume speaks for itself — no need for the on-air cast to go overboard in deifying him. Saban also has been at his best when fewer people are on set. That was the case in the 7-7:30 p.m. ET hour Monday, when he was prominently featured alongside McAfee, Howard and host Rece Davis.

“He now knows what he needs to do on television,” Gaiero said. “Early on in the season, we might mention 30 games on a production call, and he’d want to know which games I wanted him to focus on. I told him early on to think of everything like a funnel. We’re going to start off with a lot of games and teams, and then as the weeks go by, certain teams are going to fall by the wayside because they’re not going to matter anymore. His preparation can be simplified going into next year.

“I think he definitely sees himself as a broadcaster now, and he’s seeking the feedback to be a better broadcaster. This isn’t just a one-year or two-year thing for him.”

(Photo: Butch Dill / Getty Images)