{"id":2850,"date":"2011-05-10T15:00:09","date_gmt":"2011-05-10T21:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=2850"},"modified":"2013-05-14T03:25:26","modified_gmt":"2013-05-14T09:25:26","slug":"the-alienist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/?p=2850","title":{"rendered":"The Alienist"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On recommendation of one of my graphic-novel-sharing friends, I picked up a turn of the 20th Century mystery book, <a title=\"The Alienist by Caleb Carr, at Amazon\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Alienist-Caleb-Carr\/dp\/0812976142\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Alienist<\/a>. (And, seriously, it was recommended several times, and has been mentioned several times more while\u00a0I&#8217;ve\u00a0owned it unread. Which is not a complaint about my\u00a0pushy, pushy friend, it&#8217;s a wry nod to my massively overflowing bookshelf.) But the point is, I got to it, only to find (unsurprisingly) that everything I heard was true! It is in fact a pretty darn good fiction about the genesis of modern police procedure set against the trashy, immigrant-filled slums of New York City&#8217;s 1896. It occasionally bordered on feeling too modern, but never quite got there, all while managing to have a shockingly strong female protagonist in the cast, an occasionally Holmesian feel, and special guest appearances by Theodore Roosevelt and <a title=\"Thumbnail: He was good at food, y'all.\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Charles_Ranhofer\" target=\"_blank\">Charles Ranhofer<\/a>. Oh, and &#8220;the first&#8221; serial killer. That may not actually be something for <em>everyone<\/em>, but it&#8217;s something for just about everyone I want to know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On recommendation of one of my graphic-novel-sharing friends, I picked up a turn of the 20th Century mystery book, The Alienist. (And, seriously, it was recommended several times, and has been mentioned several times more while\u00a0I&#8217;ve\u00a0owned it unread. Which is not a complaint about my\u00a0pushy, pushy friend, it&#8217;s a wry nod to my massively overflowing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[517,708],"class_list":["post-2850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-historical-fiction","tag-mystery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}