A flawed but fascinating examination of the unsettling intersection of a child molester, the Mormon Church and the American...
A detailed investigation into a serial pedophile and respected elder in the Mormon Church whose years as a child molester continued even after church leaders were alerted to the abuse.
Davis’ experience as a journalist proves invaluable in this inquiry into Brother Frank Curtis and the flood of destruction his abuse brought to several Mormon communities. In addition to revealing the emotional and psychological damage caused by Curtis’ horrendous sexual violations, the author divulges the gross negligence and, in some cases, intentional cover-up by bishops and other church leaders when the abuse was discovered. The backbone of the narrative is a lawsuit involving the victims, the Church of Latter Day Saints and the lawyers on both sides of the conflict. The main player is Tim Kosnoff, a lawyer for 18-year-old Jeremiah Scott, a childhood victim of Curtis who decided as an adult to sue the Mormon Church for its role. Davis uses the lawsuit to connect different narrative threads, including Curtis’ early life as a supposed small-time Chicago gangster working for Al Capone, the varied stories of many sex-abuse victims and the lives of the attorneys and investigators working on the case. The story is profoundly disturbing, especially when the author reveals the actual abuse followed by the seemingly insidious attempts of the Mormon Church to shield its members and its doctrines through legal loopholes like the clergy-penitent privilege. At times, the narrative becomes bogged down in legal minutiae and legal tit-for-tat. Also, the personal stories of all the people involved are often summarized rather than revealed through narration, characterization and dialogue, which leaves the reader wishing for more vivid scenes and creative storytelling rather than straight, unadorned reportage.
A flawed but fascinating examination of the unsettling intersection of a child molester, the Mormon Church and the American legal system.Pub Date: March 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9103-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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