John Berendt – Carol's Notebook

Author: John Berendt

John Berendt was born in New York in 1939 and graduated from Harvard University in 1961. While at Harvard, he was on the editorial board of the Harvard Lampoon. From 1961 to 1969, he was an associate editor at Esquire and later wrote for David Frost and Dick Cavett. Berendt served as editor of New York magazine from 1977 to 1979 and wrote a monthly column for Esquire from 1982 to 1994. Berendt is the author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and The City of Falling Angels, a #1 New York Times bestseller.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a true crime classic and I don't know why it's taken me so long to read it. I will say it reads more like a novel than non-fiction, in part because the author inserts a fictionalized version of himself meeting the people of Savannah long before he actually arrived in town. He gives us a front-row seat to the characters and events leading up to the day Jim Williams shoots Danny Hansford and what follows. The first third or so of the book is meandering in a good way. We meet some of the people of the city, from the old money folks to the "upstarts," from pianists to drag queens. Some characters are so over the top that knowing they were true is fun. We also learn some of the history of the place and the historical figures associated with it. After the death (murder?) of Hansford, we see how old rivalries,...