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For over a hundred years, the mystery of Jack the Ripper has been a source of unparalleled fascination and horror, spawning an army of obsessive theorists and endless volumes purporting to finally reveal the identity of the brutal murderer who terrorized Victorian England. But what if there was never really any mystery at all? What if the Ripper was always hiding in plain sight, deliberately leaving a trail of clues to his identity for anyone who cared to look, while cynically mocking those who were supposedly attempting to bring him to justice? In They All Love Jack, the award-winning film director and screenwriter Bruce Robinson exposes the cover-up that enabled one of history's most notorious serial killers to remain at large. More than twelve years in the writing, this is no mere radical reinterpretation of the Jack the Ripper legend and an enthralling hunt for the killer. A literary high-wire act reminiscent of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, it is an expressionistic journey through the cesspools of late-Victorian society, a phantasmagoria of highly placed villains, hypocrites, and institutionalized corruption. Polemic forensic investigation and panoramic portrait of an age, underpinned by deep scholarship and delivered in Robinson's inimitably vivid and scabrous prose, They All Love Jack is an absolutely riveting and unique book, demolishing the theories of generations of self-appointed experts-the so-called Ripperologists-to make clear, at last, who really did it; and, more important, how he managed to get away with it for so long.… (more)
User reviews
I didn't know that I was all that interested in Jack the Ripper until I started reading this book. Because of what it involves, the reason behind Robinson researching the story isn't revealed until a fifth of the way into the book. His reason is interesting but not vital to the passion he has for getting to the truth behind the mystery being infectious. His historian as raconteur style helped, but this is a pacey, gripping read regardless of Robinson's voice roaring out in incredulity at you. There were times when what Robinson was describing was so farcical that I could imagine it being made into a very entertaining satirical film.
This is one of the best books I have ever read. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me boil with rage, but most of all it consolidated things I have long held to be true into a coherent appraisal of the society we live in.