Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America

Good book.

An excellent presentation of the case in a way that challenges the simplistic teaching of the bystander effect. Kitty Genovese is wrongly sidelined in Psychology teaching and this book redresses this.

Nur die erste Hälfte des Buchs liest sich interessant, weil da das Leben in New York in den 1960ern geschildert wird. Die Tat selbst ist rasch erzählt, danach verliert sich das Buch in Analysen, warum die Nachbarn zugeschaut haben und zu spät die Polizei gerufen haben. Langweilig!

This book by Kevin Cook clarifies many misperceptions about the murder of Kitty Genovese but is flawed by errors and lack of citations. It's a fascinating case, and Cook writes in an easy-to-read style. I appreciate that he aims to correct falsehoods about the famous case but I was put off by several things.1) The Genovese case is controversial because of many misstatements of fact in the initial reports of the crime. It seems to me essential that in a book that claims to be a final corrective to these mistakes that the author include clear citations to interviews and documents. There are NO footnotes in this book. I know many folks don't read them, but that's no excuse for a major author and publishing company (Norton for heaven's sake!) to leave them out. In a one paragraph "Note on Sources," Cook says that he unearthed "thousands of pages" of new documents on the Genovese case. It is irresponsible and unprofessional not to cite these sources in more specificity. They are needed to prove the veracity of Cook's research and for future historians. Big fail here.2) Cook seems to speculate at times, making it hard to understand what was speculation and what was fact. Early on, for instance, he references the killer having drinks at a bar where the victim worked. Since this was never brought up again and he does not make clear if a witness told him this, I guess he was just speculating. I am a pretty careful reader, but there are other things like this that left me scratching my head.3) Even though the book is just over 200 pages, it is padded with lots of extraneous info about the context and culture of the early 1960s in America. Context is usually a good thing and this story benefits from some background on urban culture, race relations and gay life (the victim was a lesbian), but to go on for chapters about baseball players, Beatles' playlists and quotes from Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech was too much. I was impatient for him to get on to the Genovese story.4) There are many errors in the book that should have been caught by a fact-checker: the poet Audre Lorde's name is misspelled; George Gershwin did not write "Anything Goes"; "women's lib" could not have been cited as a factor in the 1964 Genovese case as the phrase "Women's Liberation" did not emerge until 1968. When I see errors like this, it makes me wonder about other facts in the book. Given the resources the author and publisher have, this book should have been much better.Finally, Cook gives New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal a free pass by failing to discuss the journalistic ethics of a misreported story that has haunted Americans and distorted our perceptions of crime for half a century.

This is an important book, but that does not automatically make it a great book. The author Kevin Cook has taken an important subject and all the misconceptions and skewed lenses about it and delivered it from ignorance. Cook is extraordinary at nonfiction non-bias and sounds to me like he should be the voice of all our nightly newscasts. This is an outstanding book that, unlike other well written works, should have no limit of readership. Kitty Genovese was a lesbian when lesbians were not accepted. Police did their jobs with a reputation yet to be shaped by stop and frisk hard policing, before they again gained a new reputation for being racist villains. Newspaper Journalism, another artform that has been nearly destroyed since 1964, takes its lumps for rushing to judgment facts and figures. With careful consideration of all sides, include court precedings, and no slack for Winston Mosley, this book is both objective and a page turner.Unlike another reviewer here on Amazon, I enjoyed the context and felt more informed by its inclusion. The World's Fair is part of this story because this is a story of place, Queens, quiet and peaceful but piecemeal Queens. Baseball, even Hank Greenberg, matters; the early life of Mosley humanizes him without showing him sympathy. I do feel, however, that with as much scrutiny as Genovese gets in her personal matters, that the odd turns and sudden violent twists of Mosley don't tell his whole story. On one page he is minding his own business and just rather sullen; then he's confessing to previous murders and rapes and plotting one of the most unfortunate prison escapes I have ever heard of. There can be no blind eye to what he must have been thinking when he wasn't appearing to do anything. Reports of his intelligence are somewhat exaggerated; his deviance is not given its due.I knew there was something about that last Seinfeld episode that I should have paid more attention to. Cook makes dozens of such studious connections.And in the last 50 plus years, last chapter or no last chapter, we should all acknowledge that Kitty Genovese is anything but alone. The crime did not change America the way it could have or the way it could have been discussed, which is as a hate crime against a white woman with not even a whiff of a lynch mob. What makes this case stand out is also what has made it fade out. People are willing to discuss race in everything in sociology; in this particular case, as white flight increases and ghettos take root and our murders and prison population skyrocket, somehow it's just a coincidence.