It’s hard to imagine wanting to read such a story, but devotees of true crime will be drawn to this narrative.
Horrific account of a headline-making case of criminal abuse that shook a California community.
The cliché screams out at the beginning: They seemed to be such normal people, and, as a neighbor said, “nobody here knew they had twelve kids….I thought there was just one or two.” The 13 children in the Turpin household in an otherwise ordinary Southern California suburb, though, were anything but normal. They were held captive in their home for years, beaten, chained to furniture, sexually abused, forbidden to wash, fed a diet of frozen burritos and peanut butter or bologna sandwiches meal after meal. Infractions that merited corporal punishment included playing with toys or looking out the window. The children had never been to a dentist. The parents/perpetrators had themselves experienced abuse and trauma, a family history that Glatt (The Lost Girls: The True Story of the Cleveland Abductions and the Incredible Rescue of Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina DeJesus, 2015, etc.) traces over generations. There were exceedingly odd twists. The parents bought their children 10 brand-new, expensive bicycles and then "lined them up under the carport with the price tags on the handlebars and stickers on the wheels for all the neighbors to see”—but forbade the children from leaving the house to play with them. The story is creepy, with a few twists—e.g., after they were freed, it developed that the children were musically adept, singing being one of the few things they could do in captivity. Train-wreck attention-getter that it is, the book is longer than the story warrants, and it calls out for comparative treatment—for case studies of similar crimes, that is, and any conclusions that can be drawn about the perpetrators other than that they’re monstrous, which seems abundantly clear from the first page.
It’s hard to imagine wanting to read such a story, but devotees of true crime will be drawn to this narrative.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-20213-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
A dispiriting history of transgenerational violence and its victims, by a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist. The Bosket family has lived in the US for as long as there has been an American nation, first as slaves in a quiet corner of South Carolina, now as prisoners of a New York slum. New York Times writer Butterfield (China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, 1982) met one of the family, Willie James Bosketconsidered to be the most violent criminal in New York state history and dubbed ``Hannibal Lecter'' by his guards-while reporting on New York prisons. Struck by Bosket's quick intelligence and finely wrought stories of the world behind bars, Butterfield set out to study the patterns of life that brought him there. What he found, he tells us, is that ``violence is not, as many people today presume, a recent problem or a particularly urban bane. . . . Rather, it grew out of a proud culture that flourished in the antebellum rural South, a tradition shaped by whites long before it was adopted and recast by some blacks in reaction to their plight.'' In Bosket's case, as in that of his father, and his father before him, vicious crime, jail, and violent death served as a coat of arms, with the pattern repeated generation after generation, and with seemingly no way out of the cycle. Butterfield pays too little attention to the environmental causes of violence, but his book lends considerable credence to what historians and sociologists have long suspected: that the long legacy of violence in America is an integral part of our culture, and nothing seems capable of dismantling it. This book, scary and profound, is one of the most urgent of the season, and it demands much discussion.
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-58286-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
A personally and politically authoritative inquiry into modern war crimes. Allen (Comparative Literature/Syracuse Univ.) describes and analyzes three kinds of genocidal rape practiced by the Serb forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. First, soldiers brutally rape women in public, returning several days later to guarantee safe passsage for the terrified villagers only if they promise never to return. Second, persons held in concentration camps are repeatedly raped and often killed. Finally, soldiers repeatedly rape women until they become pregnant. The acts of rape continue until late enough in the pregnancy to preclude a safe abortion. The women are then released, eventually to give birth to a Serb child. Using accounts of camp survivors and those who work to help them, Allen chooses to bypass ``proper scholarly standards of source documentation'' in order to ensure the safety of her informants and future survivors of genocidal rape. Allen concentrates on genocidal rape as it takes form in impregnating women, since this particular form of genocide is unprecedented. Further, according to Allen, it is a logically flawed system of genocide, ``possible only because the policy's authors erase all identity characteristics of the mother other than that as a sexual container.'' Allen attempts to locate genocidal rape in the legal text of international war crimes, but concludes that current conceptions are not sufficient to guarantee justice against such acts. Alternatively, she suggests such violence should be prosecuted as biological warfare, because the crime requires the perpetrator to be biologically male and the victim a biological female capable of conceiving a child. Throughout, Allen reminds the reader that her primary goal with providing evidence of genocidal rape is to stop the violence, and she calls everyone to action to end the aggression. Allen provides a general and informative map to decoding ethnic relations and a specific and essential outline of genocidal rape.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8166-2818-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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