A riveting and disturbing true-crime story that reflects the enduring atrocity of rape in America.
The complex account of a young rape victim and the investigators who fought for her justice.
Veteran investigative journalists Miller and Armstrong join forces in an expansion of a ProPublica article that won them both the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. This is the story of a suspected rape of a Seattle teenager named Marie. The victim’s testimony of her violent sexual abuse at knifepoint became sullied with uncertainty as different renditions sprung forth about the night in question. Her shocking, tearful retraction of the entire event sealed her fate in the eyes of police until dogged detective Stacy Galbraith compared Marie’s cold case file with other rapes. Coinciding details and suspicions were shared with veteran detective Edna Hendershot, and Marie’s case was reopened. These developments also reclassified the perpetrator as a serial rapist responsible for multiple attacks and a penchant for blackmailing his victims with compromising photographs. Months of diligent, collaborative detective work drives the story, a chilling true-crime documentary and a report on how cops investigate sex crimes, the varying approaches on interrogation techniques, and the ultimate apprehension of violent criminals. Though the authors skip back and forth, they gradually build out the personal histories of Marie and her life as a foster child, Galbraith and Hendershot’s law enforcement career paths, some startling statistics on rape victims, and why the broad skepticism and credibility issues encompassing accusers remain a problem. Amplifying the story is the dismaying biography of the rapist, a deranged military man with a twisted obsession with the humiliation, degradation, and enslavement of women. Throughout the book, the authors display meticulous investigative reporting skills, using documents, case files, and interviews with victims and witnesses. Their urgent account delivers absolute vindication in a serpentine crime investigation that initially betrayed its victim.
A riveting and disturbing true-crime story that reflects the enduring atrocity of rape in America.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-5993-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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