Highly entertaining treadmill listening. Some of the stories are almost too fantastical to believe. Filled a big gap in my knowledge about famous crimes, esp the exceptionally lurid Lizzie Borden story.

A very interesting course that gives an overview of both the history of forensic sciences and crime scene investigation and how those sciences were or were not used in investigating some very famous historical crimes. Definitely not for the faint of heart, but very interesting and a good lecturer.

4.5 (A-)

I've listened to Great Course lectures series before and they are always high quality.

The instructor has a nice voice and presentation, and the overview of forensic history is well presented and quite interesting. I like the concise summaries and interesting side tracks. Some of it, like the lecture on genocide, are sad to listen to, but still interesting.

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Interesting information throughout. This group of lecturers are as titled, a history in forensics, it's not overly scientific and anyone can get good information to take away. I enjoyed that the topics varied and you were able to see how forensics have evolved and how they are used in different crimes and circumstances.

This lecture series was really interesting. However, the sections I was familiar with before listening contained a number of factual errors. Perhaps none of the errors are very important to the overall content and mainly in anecdotes used to illustrate a point, but sadly they make me doubt the validity of a lot of the rest of the content.

1. The person who shot Olof Palme was not wearing a ski mask and the most mainstream theory is that he left the area on foot, not in a waiting car as the lecturer states.

2. The Black September terrorist group did request the release of the founders of the Red Army Faction (RAF, or the Baader-Meinhof Gang as they were often known colloquially). However, the RAF was not, as the lecture says, a radical neo-nazi terror cell but rather the opposite, as the name also implies, a radical communist terror cell. Calling the RAF neo-nazis puts a very different spin on the aims of the Black September group. Requesting the release of the RAFs founders was probably done mainly in an attempt to garner support from Germany's radical left.

Also, the section on genocides definitely seems a bit sanitized. It is clearly stated that the almost complete eradication of Native Americans from North America was not a genocide (with some small exceptions) while both the Ukranian Famine and Great Chinese Famine are both genocides. The reasons seem a bit fuzzy, but the European colonizers in North America are not guilty of genocide as they did not fully understand what they were doing, while the Ukranian and Great Chinese famines are genocides as the political programs which caused these famines continued even after the famines had started.

However, it could be argued that in both these cases the, admittedly inept, communist leaders thought that the only way to solve the famines was to continue the policies, especially as even though the policies exacerbated the famines, which should be clear with 20/20 hindsight, they were both started by bad weather and natural disasters rather than the policies themselves, and there was no 20/20 hindsight yet. Why is ignorance an excuse in the one case but not the others? Note, I am not defending the policies of either the USSR or China, I am just questioning whether the definition of genocide put forth by the lecturer is enough to absolve the Europeans in North America but condemn the communists in the USSR and China.

In general, the book seems very US-centric. This is understandable as both the lecturer and company are American, but it is very noticeable to any non-American listeners.