"Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers " with Caroline Fraser

Caroline Fraser joins the Coming From Left Field podcast to discuss "Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers," her genre-bending blend of true crime, environmental muckraking, and personal memoir about growing up near Tacoma’s Asarco smelter in the heyday of Ted Bundy and other Pacific Northwest serial killers. Drawing on research about lead and arsenic exposure, brain science, and corporate archives, Fraser argues that heavy metal poisoning, especially from smelters and leaded gasoline, helped shape an era of unprecedented violent crime, while corporations and regulators concealed what they knew to protect profits.

The conversation ranges from the company town politics of Ruston and Kellogg, Idaho, to bankruptcy scams that left taxpayers with Superfund bills, to gendered effects of lead on male and female brains, and the cultural fascination with serial killers. Along the way, Fraser and the hosts connect Murderland to earlier work like Prairie Fires, to Frank Herbert’s Dune as an industrial-ecological parable rooted in Tacoma, and to today’s fights over toxic redevelopment and AI-era data centers, which repeat the same jobs-versus-health trade-offs.

 

Caroline Fraser is an American nonfiction writer and literary critic best known for her Pulitzer Prize–winning biography “Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.” Born in Seattle to a Christian Science family, she graduated from Mercer Island High School and later earned a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard University, writing her dissertation on the poet James Merrill.

Fraser previously worked on the editorial staff of The New Yorker and has written for publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, Outside Magazine, and the London Review of Books. She is the author of several major nonfiction books: “God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church,” a critical history and memoir about Christian Science; “Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution,” on global conservation; “Prairie Fires,” which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography;

 

Resources:

Order the book: https://kingsbookstore.com/book/9780593657225

 

Webpage: https://www.carolinefraser.net/

 

Greg’s Blog: http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

Pat’s Substack: https://patcummings.substack.com/

 

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