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Nothing is Strange with You: The Life and Crimes of Gordon Stewart Northcott
Average Customer Review : 3.5/5 based on 19 reviews
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Spotlight Reviews
NOTHING IS STRANGE WITH MR. NORTHCOTT, WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT. (2009-01-06)
Customer Review : 5
As I imagine most people will be drawn to this book after watching Clint Eastwood's film Changeling, I'll start with a heartfelt recommendation: if you want to know what the real events were, or if you're only slightly intrigued by the story and want to know more, BUY THIS BOOK NOW. You will surprisingly find out that most of what you've been shown in the movie Changeling, is fiction. And bad fiction, by the way. Hollywood-style superficiality at the very worst. And it is not the first time that Mr. Eastwood commits the sin of superficiality.
Some readers have suggested that the reading is tedious - not at all! It is very engaging to say the least, including the trial transcripts, because Stewart Northcott ia an absolutely hilarious, one-of-a-kind, character, with his boyish bravado, his defiant smile, his sarcastic wit, his posing for the camera, and his insistence on living life as he sees fit.
If we are to make another film, the performance of Northcott in court alone well deserves a script on its own: the way in which he would ask himself a question and then give the answer, his comical kaleidoscopic leaps from one irrelevant subject to another, his sighs and puffs. Possibly directed by the Coen brothers, this time. Enough with Clint.
Gordon Stewart Northcott is not a serial killer. He didn't have a urge to kill. He was a young man who would engange in sexual, and possibly romantic, relations with young boys. He would spend time look out for boys (don't your 'normal' guys just do the same with girls?), bring them back to the ranch or to a hotel, and them bring them back home. A serial killer would have killed them all. Therefore if you are into serial killers, just look elsewhere. I personally believe the murders of the Winslow boys (and Walter Collins) were committed out of panic. Hastily committed and out of fear of discovery. Northcott had realised that he had kept the children at the ranch for too long, and people were starting to look for them. There was no chance of letting them go without them revealing where they had been all along. For this reason, they died.
One reader says he/she won't blame the author, Jeff Paul, for 'not being able to make Northcott and his motives comprehensible'. I wonder if this reader has read the same book as I have, because Northcott's motives are very clear to those who want to 'comprehend'.
Some reviewers seem to enjoy filling their mouths with 21st century political correctness & hysteria: 'monster', 'nutcase', 'predator', and bla, bla, bla. Forgive me if I was not able to find 'monster' as a synonym for 'paedophile' in the dictionary. It's just not there.
It is far to easy, gentlemen, it is too much a convenient way out to label someone 'crazy' only because they are 'different'.
I do NOT condone the murders. But I am not blind before complexity of human nature. I understand the dynamics. I understand the feelings. Even Northcott's remark to Sandford, his nephew, upon leaving the ranch in the mornings - 'I am going away for fresh meat!' - is, in a way, comical. If you want to find something disturbing in him, you have to go for his childish selfishness, his focusing on gratifying his own desires and his alone, his fits of temper, his puerile disregard for the feelings and well-being of others. This type of personality, when confronted with fear, when confronted with panic, saw murder as the only possible escape.
'Go away for fresh meat' are not the words of a 'monster', rather the amused words of a self-centred, and sometimes naive, boy who decides to eventually feel ALIVE, and REFUSES TO LEAD A LIFE OF LIVING-DEATH, which society wishes to impose on him.
Isn't this a perfectly 'human' demand?
A legitimate 'human' desire?
Are you so sure you would have wanted differently in his shoes?
Northcott and his mother were not 'unbalanced', as one reader suggests. On the contrary, they were perfectly balanced. She was the only possible mother for him. And he was the right child for her. His life could have been much worse had he had a different mother - could have been a nightmare.
In the book she stands out as the quintessential mother: she stands by her son, and by he son only, to the very end. Read the note she writes to Stewart to inform him that she has found a letter from him to one of his child-friends, and note the tact with which she reassures him that she hasn't read its content, once she had realised that it was for someone else, for a child. Read of her when she confesses to the murder of Walter Collins hoping this would spare her son.
Think about it: could she have acted differently? The answer is, NO.
She could only 'love'. And that's what she did. Pure, unconditional, motherly love.
This book is quite a journey. In the end I was out of breath.
As the books end, an impending feeling of death creeps in. Death approaches and you can't stop it from coming.
Death. Death everywhere. In the prosecutor's final speech. In Stewart's final crazed 'confessions'.
And the letters from Stewart to his father...'I am your lonely, frightened boy'.
You see the gallows in the distance. You want to cut the rope. You want to stop it but you can't.
And again, out of breath.
Again, gasping.
Then you turn the page and you see the picture of Sanford Clark's grave, and you feel happy that he still managed to have a fulfilling life, that, in the author's own words, 'even unimaginable suffering cannot destroy the human spirit'. You read of Louise Northcott as an older lady, eventually reunited with her husband. And you have the feeling of coming full circle. And it is almost a feeling of release, a feeling of peace.
I feel like I have learned more about human nature from this single book than from a whole shelf of my university books.
Do yourself a favour: BUY THIS BOOK.
And read it with an open mind and a compassionate heart.
Gordon Stewart Northcott was hung on October 2, 1930, at just 24 years of age.
24 YEARS OF AGE.
And denied a second chance in life.
It took him 12 minutes to die.
'CAN YOU LOOK AT ANY MAN AND SAY WHAT HE DESERVES?'
There is no Good, and there is no Evil.
There is only human nature, its powerful drive, its mysterious force.
Ultimately, there is only what we are and the million different things we can be.
Self-published, and it shows; could use a good editing (2008-12-31)
Customer Review : 3
I first came across the name Gordon Stewart Northcott years ago in a Los Angeles Times article about the death penalty in California. Because the image of an early-century, chicken-farming serial killer is so different from that of the later monsters who'd stain the scene, the story lingered in my mind, but the case is so old that there was little to be found about it on the Internet, or elsewhere, until Clint Eastwood's "Changeling" was released. This book manages to digest and regurgitate some of the late 1920's newspaper coverage and much of the trial transcript for the reader, but it does little more than that. There are too many long, inevitably tedious passages from the trial transcript, as Northcott (who acted as his own lawyer) ineffectively questioned witnesses, and trial transcripts rarely make for good reading, no matter how skilled the advocate. As a result, the book tends to be very hard going for anyone not determined to make it through to the end. Sociopaths, by their very nature, are all but impossible nuts to crack, and I don't blame the author for not being able to make Northcott or his motives comprehensible. Still, the book has a definite lifelessness that a good editor might have been able to alleviate. Even the capture of Northcott is so drily presented that I had to go back and re-read the passage to be sure that it had happened. The author says there are many photographs of Northcott available; the tedious text could have done with many more. Lastly, the book lacks both index and bibliography, which I find hard to forgive in a work of nonfiction.
Disappointed in this book (2008-12-29)
Customer Review : 1
This book is horribly written. the way it is written makes if very hard to follow because it jumps back and forth between people and places.
The author of this book should have had a few more writing classes before he tried to write this book.
I will never buy another of his books!
Review of "Nothing is Strange with You....." (2008-12-20)
Customer Review : 5
Well written, this book describes the life and crimes of a very sick family. It is riveting. After seeing the movie, this book filled in all the "details" about the crimes. Well done. Great read.
book (2008-12-17)
Customer Review : 3
I got this book because I wanted to learn more about the case behind the "changeling". It did provide that information. I would not put it up next to an Ann Rule book, but if you are looking for further info, it's here.
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