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Music You Will Never Hear

Name: Music You Will Never Hear
Author: Angelo J. Kaltsos
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9599-6

by Angelo J. Kaltsos ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 20, 2016

A compelling account of an American life marked forever by a crime.

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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

Categories:

TRUE CRIME

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MY STORY

by Elizabeth Smart with Chris Stewart ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2013

Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | TRUE CRIME

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LUCKY

by Alice Sebold ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1999

Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will...

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A stunningly crafted and unsparing account of the author’s rape as a college freshman and what it took to win her case in court.

In 1981, Sebold was brutally raped on her college campus, at Syracuse University. Sebold, a New York Times Magazinecontributor, now in her 30s, reconstructs the rape and the year following in which her assailant was brought to trial and found guilty. When, months after the rape, she confided in her fiction professor, Tobias Wolff, he advised: “Try, if you can, to remember everything.” Sebold heeded his words, and the result is a memoir that reads like detective fiction, replete with police jargon, economical characterization, and film-like scene construction. Part of Sebold’s ironic luck, besides the fact that she wasn’t killed, was that she was a virgin prior to the rape, she was wearing bulky clothing, and her rapist beat her, leaving unmistakable evidence of violence. Sebold casts a cool eye on these facts: “The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case.” Sebold critiques the sexism and misconceptions surrounding rape with neither rhetoric nor apology; she lets her experience speak for itself. Her family, her friends, her campus community are all shaken by the brutality she survived, yet Sebold finds herself feeling more affinity with police officers she meets, as it was “in [their] world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.” Just when Sebold believes she might surface from this world, a close friend is raped and the haunting continues. The last section, “Aftermath,” has an unavoidable tacked-on-at-the-end feel, as Sebold crams over a decade’s worth of coping and healing into a short chapter.

Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge.