A compelling account of an American life marked forever by a crime.
Kaltsos (The Boy Who Was Shanghaied, 2014, etc.) explores a dark chapter of his family’s history in this memoir.
The author was raised by his Greek immigrant grandmother in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston in a house full of aunts and uncles. One night at dinner in 1946, the family gathered around the table to discuss the recent murder of a police sergeant: “It made big headlines in all the papers. The city hadn’t lost too many police in the line of duty up to this time. It was major news, and there was a big manhunt for the killer or killers.” The only member of the family not present at the table was the author’s uncle Bill Goudas, who was laid up in bed with a hurt ankle. Goudas suffered from a lifelong heart condition that kept him from overextending himself. He did not graduate from high school, but he taught himself how to play guitar and had dreams of attending the New England Conservatory of Music. The family was therefore shocked when a swarm of police officers showed up at the house to arrest Goudas for the murder of Sgt. William Healy. All the men of the Goudas family were taken into custody (including the author, who was 16 at the time), though only Goudas was charged with participating in the nighttime burglary that led to Healy’s death. The book follows the absorbing story of Goudas’ trial and the surrounding media storm as well as his time in prison and eventual parole. He is an intriguing character, and the nature of his crime, imprisonment, and release is fertile material for literature. Kaltsos is not a particularly strong prose writer, but his proximity to the case and his willingness to tell the story through scenes give the work an emotional energy that keeps the reader invested enough to keep going. For the author, the tragedy of the title refers not so much to the death of the police officer but to the life that was slowly destroyed as Kaltsos looked on helplessly: that of his Uncle Bill.
A compelling account of an American life marked forever by a crime.Pub Date: June 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9599-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.
Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Maryland decision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61254-149-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...
The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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