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True Crime Book Club

"The Five" by Hallie Rubenhold

Jack the Ripper terrorized the Whitechapel section of London in the late 1880s. Who were the victims? What were their lives like? Rubenhold centers the experiences and lives of Jack's victims.

A great way to discover and discuss new and classic true crime writing—from murder, to robbery, heists and arson—we touch on every aspect of humanity's darker instincts.

In August we will read "The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper" by Hallie Rubenhold.

From Amazon:

Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London—the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper.

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.

What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women.

For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time—but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman.

We meet on the third Monday of every other month starting in January. View and print the list of books and check out WPPL's Book Discussion page for more book and movie clubs!

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