Gregory A. Fournier

What an excellent book! This book talks about the serial murders committed by John Norman Collins (Chapman). It is very detailed, about the victims and the killer. It gave the story of the girls who were murdered by Collins and their hopes for a future. The girls were students at the University, looking forward to their futures, hopes and dreams. Then there is the killer, John Norman Collins, also a college student. There was nothing really special about him, nothing that stuck out. He seemed to be a "normal" student. He rarely showed any ambition, or anger issues. He was very charming and charismatic. That is what made it all so easy. This book was well-written, well researched and easy to read. I had previously read the other book on this case, but this one is far superior, in my opinion. It even has really nice photos of the victims, including Roxie Phillips in California. Read this book! You will not regret it.… (meer)

Found this on the New Books shelf of the Macomb Community College South Campus Library where I worked. Seeing that it was a novel about the 1967 riots that shook Detroit a month before I moved here to start college, I grabbed it.
It's an interesting story about a suburban college student from Dearborn (at that time, a bastion of white segregation whose "Keep Dearborn Clean" city motto made a fierce point) who comes to make friends with blacks during 18 months spent working in a grungy industrial hellhole on a man-made island in the Detroit River. When the riot erupts, he realizes that none of his family or the friends he grew up with and went to school with can see rioters as anything more than ignorant savages.
Great literature it isn't. But it brings back a time when I was pretty much getting to know black people for the first time. (In my life back in Bay City, there were a total of two black students in the three schools I attended before starting college). And it also brought back memories of the summer I spent working in a foundry in Saginaw between my Freshman and Sophomore years.
It wasn't until after I finished the book that I saw the sticker inside the front cover reporting that it had been donated to the library collection by librarian Bruce Bett. Good stuff, Bruce.… (meer)