Victim: The Other Side of Murder

Victim: The Other Side of Murder
by Gary Kinder

Victim: The Other Side of Murder
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Book Summary Information

Author: Gary Kinder
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-05-19
ISBN: 0871137356
Number of pages: 322
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press

Book Reviews of Victim: The Other Side of Murder

Book Review: GRABS YOU BY THE THROAT AND DOES NOT LET GO
Summary: 5 Stars

Gary Kinder is definitely a practitioner of the old saying "don't tell them, show them." A former prosecutor, Kinder tries his hand at writing a true crime book about a boy with his whole life ahead of him who blunders into a horrific store heist, is seriously disfigured and left for dead by the robbers. His mother comes looking for him and is similarly tortured (in her case, fatally). Kinder reconstructs the ordeal of the victim (hence the title) almost minute by minute. He then takes you through the police investigation and trial of the criminals. But all the while, he keeps the spotlight on the victim, which sets this apart from most true crime books. He never editorializes or preaches. He lays out the facts in a clear yet compelling prose style and he lets them speak for themselves. Kinder teaches a Continuing Legal Education course on legal brief writing (I'd love to be a fly on that wall). And if you think this is a good book, you will also want to read his "Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea."

Summary of Victim: The Other Side of Murder

Now a classic of true crime, Victim is a compelling and tragic look at how lives can be changed forever by a random act of violence. During an armed robbery, several hostages were brutally tortured, shot in the head, and left for dead. Victim focuses on the members of one family -- including a mother who died after the attack and a son who was left barely alive -- as they fought for his survival and struggled to rebuild their lives. Victim was the first book to go beyond the headlines and statistics about violent crime, to tell the victims' dramatic story of love, loss and courage. It remains one of the most influential books in the victims' rights movement and has become required reading in criminology courses across the country. It may be more relevant now than ever. "Victim is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood turned inside out." -- Newsweek; "Just as Capote did, Kinder has somehow created a story that is truer than true." -- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

First published in 1980, Victim was, and remains, a landmark turning point in the then-newly emerging victim's rights movement. When Gary Kinder (who would achieve even more fame and bestsellerdom in the 1990s with Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea) wrote this littérature vérité account of an execution-style bloodbath during an armed robbery, his emphasis on the victims' perspectives changed the true crime genre forever.

In 1974 two men walked into an Ogden, Utah, music store called the Hi-Fi Shop and took the manager and his assistant hostage while they methodically robbed the store. During the course of the robbery, three other people--16-year-old Cortney Naisbitt, his mother, and the father of the store's manager--walked in by chance and were also taken hostage. Before the end of the ordeal, the hostages would be forced to drink Drano ("It's some kind of German chemical that makes you sleep," one of the killers tells them), one of them would be repeatedly raped, another would have a pencil kicked into his ear with such force that it bulged out at his throat, and three of the hostages would die from close-range gunshot wounds. Naisbitt would effectively spend the rest of his life attempting to recover from brain damage, paralysis, and the loss of his mother, shot dead as she lay on the ground next to him. It's almost incidental to the story to note that the killers were quickly discovered and brought to justice before eventually garnering death sentences. Most of Victim is concerned with Cortney Naisbitt's second-by-second struggle to remain alive ("No Code," an ER physician writes on his chart, meaning no attempts to resuscitate him should he stop breathing), and the equally grim battle of his relatives to tape back together the ripped tapestry of their lives. Utterly compelling from first paragraph to last, this edition contains Kinder's 1990 update. --Tjames Madison

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