Burleigh’s propulsive narrative and the many unsettling aspects of the case make this a standout among recent true-crime...
Powerful assessment of a tragic crime and its disastrous aftermath.
The 2007 murder of British student Meredith Kercher in the university town of Perugia, Italy, at first seemed scandalously comprehensible: The victim’s amoral American housemate, Amanda Knox, bewitched two Italian men into a “sex game” gone bad. Journalist and Elle contributing editor Burleigh (Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed, and Forgery in the Holy Land, 2008, etc.) argues that Knox and her equally naive boyfriend became unwitting scapegoats to a fumbled investigation and a volatile mix of Italian gender issues and local mores (she adeptly portrays Perugia as a gritty, conservative region with a tangled history). Although authorities quickly convicted Rudy Guede, a troubled local, they then successfully prosecuted Knox despite a near-total lack of credible evidence, other than her strange outbursts and writings. “The scenario presented by the prosecution was not very plausible,” writes the author. “The two students did not behave like guilty people…[but] were guilty of callous, blithe, and stupid behavior.” It was this that damned them from the Italian perspective, but Burleigh establishes that Knox’s adolescent self-indulgence was both typically American and reactive to a seamy European hedonism that is both moralistically condemned and economically tolerated. The author writes in a colorful, amped-up style that’s also thoughtful and detail-oriented, capturing how this cross-cultural milieu spawned a murder case in which all involved—the Italian authorities, the feckless youngsters, the media—look awful. Burleigh establishes much background information, allowing her to plausibly indict a “labyrinthine judicial bureaucracy lacking any official public face or any rules of transparency.” She notes that in Italy, the police often sue defendants for slander, and “defense witnesses…are not sworn in, and they are presumed to be lying.” Ultimately, she argues, Knox simply made a more fascinating villain than Guede, despite his burglaries and damning forensic evidence. Her devastating conclusion shows how actual physical evidence supports Knox’s alibi and suggests that the disturbed Guede acted alone.
Burleigh’s propulsive narrative and the many unsettling aspects of the case make this a standout among recent true-crime titles.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-58858-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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