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Internal Combustion: The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City | 
| Author: Joyce Maynard
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $0.35
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Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 657012
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 496
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 0787982261
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.1523092
EAN: 9780787982263
ASIN: 0787982261
Publication Date: September 22, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Publisher: Jossey-BassDate of Publication: 2006Binding: Hard CoverCondition: Very GoodDescription: 0787982261 A wonderful copy with some minor edgewear to the cover. Dust Jacket has some edgewear present. 2006 Jossey-Bass Hard Cover
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
On Mother's Day night, 2004, award-winning fourth grade teacher Nancy Seaman left the Tudor home she shared with her husband of thirty two years in the gated community of Farmington Hills, near Detroit, Michigan, and drove in a driving rain storm to Home Depot, to purchase a hatchet. Three days later, police discovered the mutilated body of Bob Seaman - a successful auto industry engineer, softball coach and passionate collector of vintage Mustangs - in the back of the family's Ford Explorer. As the shackles were placed on her wrists, Nancy Seaman asserted that her husband had been beating her, and she'd killed him in self-defense. At her trial, two radically different stories emerged. One of the couple's sons, Greg, testified that his father had been abusing his mother for years. The other, Jeff, testified for the prosecution, charging his mother as a cold blooded killer. Joyce Maynard's chilling work delves beyond the events of the crime itself, to explore the lives of an American family who seemed to have everything. Her exploration of the story led to a year's research in suburban Detroit - but the story she found there will take the reader to the Depression-era farm country of Illinois, the working class neighborhoods of the auto industry in its heyday and even, surprisingly, to a Baptist church in burned-out downtown Detroit. Along the way we meet a Transylvanian forensic pathologist, a beautiful young prosecutor, an old-school police chief, a television news crew hungry for ratings, the softball scorekeeper mom accused of carrying on an affair with the murdered man, and her two shell shocked teenagers, still reeling from the death of their beloved coach, and a mother who has to tell her daughter why her favorite teacher won't be in school any more. As in Joyce Maynard's previous books - including To Die For, based on a true crime, and her best selling memoir, At Home in the World - Joyce Maynard's themes here involve family secrets, the deep fissures that lie below the surface of the glittering exteriors, and the deep, potentially fatal, fissures in the American Dream.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 Fizzeled February 24, 2008
First part of the book is interesting until the trial is over.
Then the after the trial the rest of the book is tedious and somewhat boring.
Fascinating if Flawed January 25, 2008
Author Joyce Maynard does a terrific job of recreating this fascinating true-crime story: of an award-winning school teacher, Nancy Seaman, who butchered her husband, tried to hide his body and then tried to use the battered wife syndrome as her defense. The killer comes across as arrogant, cold, manipulative and repulsive. Instead of her being the battered wife, it appears her husband was the actual battered victim. The way the killer tries to adopt the personae of a battered woman is repulsive and enrages the reader. One of her sons, Greg, appears pathologically incapable of seeing his mother as a vicious killer, while his brother, Jeff, sees her as a cold-blooded murderess whose attempts to persuade him and her friends at school that she was the victim of a heartless wife beater are hysterical. Whenever she bruised herself, she would go around touting the bruise as just one piece of evidence that she is being beaten. Where I had problems with the book is when the author heavily interweaves her own life of marital problems into the mix, as if trying to justify her fascination with this case. She spends much too much time describing her failure to attain interviews with Greg and his killer Mom and other friends and enemies of the Seaman family. Jeff comes across as a boor who continuously stands up the author for scheduled interviews. Sometimes an author can step into the story and enhance it, if it adds another dimension to it--much like what Jim Schutze did in his fascinating study of judicial lynching in BY TWO BY TWO. This is when twin sisters were accused of murdering the dentist husband of one and the charges of a psychopathic, alcoholic drug addict were used to railroad one sister into prison for life, while the other one was acquitted. But in INTERNAL COMBUSTION, the author's personal intrusion into a fascinating study of evil dampens the effect of the story. I'd like to see what Ann Rule or Jim Schutze would have done with this true life tragedy.
Padded, But Still Well Written January 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
What do you do when you set out to write a true crime book, but the perp won't talk, even though you've invested a lot of time and money in the faith that she will? Well, this book shows how to get around that major problem. You pad it. Pad it with observations about everything you did while waiting around for the key interview that won't ever happen. You attend the funeral of a Four Tops singer. What's that got to do with Nancy Seaman? Nada. You hang out at the lake house of the local courthouse reporter and pad a few chapters about that. You decide you'll draw parallels with your own failed marriage and divorce. That's good for maybe 25 percent of the required pages to make your book contract. Hmm. Let's see, now? What else can you pad with? Oh, I know. Make some big socioeconomic generalizations about the haves and have nots who populate both sides of the tracks in your setting, in this case, Detroit's 8 Mile Road. Even so, this book is still pretty interesting and Maynard is a world-class writer. So you should read it, even though it's deeply flawed. The case in question is a real beaut.
 Gripping, Intimate Tale of Family Tragedy November 1, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Both as a "what-made-her-do-it?" investigation and as a searing cultural and family study of 3 generations of Detroit-area auto engineering people, Maynard relentlessly digs for truth and understanding of murderous rage that destroyed a prosperous family. I stayed up all night two nights in a row to finish it and was sad to see it end, but the book forced me to think hard about the catastrophic violence waiting to explode in so many feuding families -- and what causes the explosions to occur, as well as the consequences for the survivors. Regardless of how tranquil your world, you will be shaken by the story of what may have caused an award-winning 4th grade teacher to take a hatchet to her husband's head. The author's intermittent reflections on her own fascination with the story add extra poignancy and mirrored many of the questions I was asking myself about this fascinating case study of a seeming typical American upper middle class family. A real treasure.
Internally Combusting September 11, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Let me say this on the onset: I love Joyce Maynard and her writing style. Which is why when I saw this book at the airport 2 weeks ago, I jumped at it and wondered how I had not known it was out. That was 2 weeks ago. Now, 2 weeks later, I am frustrated with the obvious bias and contempt Maynard shows toward Nancy Seaman. I am not sure where this comes from: perhaps because Seaman refused to give Maynard an interview. But the book comes out completely one-sided, despite assertions time and time again by the author that she wants to be fair to all. You get the same feeling when the author speaks about Greg (bad son) vs. Jeff (good son).
I am now at the point where I am now rolling my eyes every time she makes a side comment about Nancy. The section on Nancy calling people "[...]" is actually laughable. By this point, the author is portraying Nancy as the most ungrateful, most despicable, most unreasonable woman in America. Of course, not to mention that she is also an ax murderer.
However, when you see the "support" Nancy gets from her community, the Judge, as well as the angle of the CBS 48 Hours documentary, one really has got to wonder who is really being fair and balanced.
I give the book a 3 because, even with the flaws of the book (such as Maynard now inserting herself into the story -- what is THAT about?), the writing style is still very enjoyable.
But the story itself is really really really sad.
And, I do have a side comment of my own: even though Julie Dumbleton may not have been sleeping with Bob Seaman, I truly believe she was in love with him (the kind of love a spouse has the right to wonder about); and as much as Nancy was fighting for her man, so was Julie giving back ounce for ounce. She is not an innocent naive woman one bit. Instead, I see her as a very calculating woman who was instrumental to the break-down of a marriage. And, quite honestly, I see what Julie and Bob had as an affair. It obviously was not sexual or intimate, but an affair nonetheless.
Like I said, it has been 2 weeks now, and I am internally combusting, but determined to finish the book, because I paid for it. But I am at the point where I am wondering when the book changed from "The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City" to "My Life and Times As A Woman, Mother and Writer." The whole focus of the book seems to have changed.
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