Angel Face: Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox [Paperback]

Barbie Latza Nadeau (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 6, 2010

Despite all the airtime devoted to Amanda Knox, it’s still hard to reconcile the fresh-faced honor student from Seattle with the sexually rapacious killer convicted of the November 2007 murder of her British roommate. Few Americans have heard all of the powerful evidence that convinced a jury that Knox was one of three people to sexually assault Meredith Kercher, brutalize her body, and cut her throat. In Angel Face, Rome-based Daily Beast senior writer Barbie Latza Nadeau – who cultivated personal relationships with the key figures in both the prosecution and the defense – describes how the Knox family’s heavy-handed efforts to control media coverage distorted the facts, inflamed an American audience, and painted an offensive, inaccurate picture of Italy’s justice system. An eye-opener for any parent considering sending a child away to study, Angel Face reveals what really went on in this incomprehensible crime.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Linda Fairstein, author and former sex crimes prosecutor
“Angel Face is a brilliant postmortem of the most fascinating and disturbing true crime in recent memory.”

John Guare, playwright
“Armchair detectives of the world, unite! Angel Face is the book you’ve been waiting for.”

Marcia Clark, former L.A. District Attorney and legal commentator
“Well-researched and beautifully written, even if you’re not a true-crime buff, this book is a must-read!”

About the Author

As a senior writer for The Daily Beast, Barbie Latza Nadeau provided weekly reports on the Amanda Knox case and trial throughout 2008 and 2009. She is also a regular contributor to Newsweek and a frequent commentator on CNN and the BBC. A fourteen-year resident of Rome, she has reported from Italy on everything from natural disasters to papal investitures.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 16 and up
  
• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Beast Books (April 6, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0984295135
• ISBN-13: 978-0984295135
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 4.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (76 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #693,641 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

183 of 215 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Author's bias hurts their credibility, November 4, 2010

By 

Jaha (CT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Angel Face: Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox (Paperback)

I honestly never heard of Amanda Knox until a couple months ago but this case intrigued me. Unfortunately there is a lot of heated public disagreements over this case and as such just about all of the media surrounding it is biased in one way or another. Naturally the several books written on the case so far are also biased, each in their own way. So in my quest to gather as many facts about the case as possible I decided to just read several of the books and then hope to find the truth somewhere in the middle. I started with Murder in Italy and followed it up with this book, Angel Face by Barbie Nadeau. I found the two books to be completely different in bias, style, and substance.

First off I must warn, if you are looking to read only one book on the Amanda Knox case then I would steer you far away from Nadeau's book. The length of the book will surely attract casual readers but unfortunately the title is very misleading when it says "True Story." Here is why.

1. It's very short clocking in at a scant 200 pages typeset with an eye friendly 12 maybe 14 point font and double spaced. It reminds me of a Harry Potter book or any mid level high school history essay. It could probably be 60 pages long if you dropped the spacing, font size, and removed a lot of the filler unrelated to the case. In other words the book just isn't long enough to give a complete overview of this complex case.

2. The style is entirely Anecdotal. Murder in Italy is a dense read full of tons of facts, sources, reprints of documents, etc, whereas Nedeau's is more like she is sitting in your room just telling you her take on the case real quick and why she thinks Knox is guilty. Because of this style Nadeau offers very little in the way of citations and sources of her material. She does use quite a few quotes in her narrative but they are scattered and lack any sourcing. Worse, she often emphasizes some facts to mislead or flat out omits some key facts you otherwise wouldn't know if you hadn't read other material. There is no bibliography. Nadeau merely just lauds herself as being an expert supposedly because she read all the 10,000 pages of court documents and spent every day in court. Unfortunately when one cross-references Nadeau's anecdote with the case facts found in other books you will find numerous conflicts, contradictions, misleading statements, omissions, etc.

The result is that Nadeau's book is simply her own opinion of the case, rather than an objective look at the truth of the case which the title implies. There is nothing wrong with opinion analysis just realize that if you are unfamiliar with the case you are getting only the selected facts Nadeau chooses to give you and everything is loaded so you will see the case only in the way that supports her theory.

The only value I found in Nadeau's book was that when read in conjunction with Murder in Italy I was able to get a better picture of some of the fuzzier moments of the case. Murder in Italy is also biased, this time in favor of Knox, but the bias is different. Bremmer, in her book, adds opinionated emphasis to her account however she rarely seems to omit facts or evidence the way Nadeau does. However because her focus was on other areas of the case, she does make some small omissions of early case details. Nadeau's book helps it grasping those with a clearer issue.

But on it's own Nadeau's book is such a mess of error's, confusing contradiction's, and way too many personal rants of how much she hate's the defendant's family. Nadeau makes numerous types of mistakes ranging from contradiction to flat out petty misleading statements.

Examples:

-In the opening pages Nadeau points out that Knox's only previous run in with the law was an "Arrest for a Seattle noise violation" for a party she threw. This is petty because Knox (and pretty much anyone else in America) wasn't "arrested". She was handed a citation which is a fine no different than a parking ticket. Use of the term "arrested" misleads the reader into thinking it was something far more serious than some loud teenagers in a suburban neighborhood.

-As Nadeau quickly runs the reader through the events of the case, she is extremely selective in her presentation of facts. This has an effect of leading the reader to doubt Knox and Solecito before she has even gotten to the murder. One point that confused me was Nadeau purposely mentions a phone call from Solecito's father to his apartment at 8:40pm on the night of the murder which as she puts it, "was not answered." This implies that Knox and Solecito were not at his apartment when they said they were. A big problem is that Nadeau has neglected to report that an eyewitness testified that she spoke directly to Knox at Solecito's apartment at 8:45 pm the same night. You would never know this if you only listen to Nadeau. This gets confusing later on though because Nadeau (as did the Prosecution) acknowledges that Knox and Solecito probably were at his apartment and didn't leave until well after 9 pm. This begs the question, why mislead and cast doubt on the defendants whereabouts at 8:40 pm if it's immaterial to the case entirely? Simple, if the reader believes that the defendants lied about something as harmless as where they were at 8:40pm then they would easily lie about where they were later on. The big problem is that Knox and Solecito didn't lie and Nadeau should KNOW this if she had read all the facts of the case. Either she didn't know of this fact or more likely she is misleading the reader.

-The famous double DNA knife is another example of confusing contradiction. Nadeau introduces the reader to the knife by lauding the work of the DNA specialist and just about everything the knife represented. She seems quite confident the knife is an indication of guilt. However, in later chapters, Nadeau acknowledges that there were technical problems with the DNA testing. (This is a theme in the book where whenever Nadeau seems to mention any fact or argument favoring the defense (of which there are few), she does so by making it appear that it's all a legal technicality, not some indication of innocence.) She also acknowledges that the prosecutions own forensic experts who studied the wounds, claimed the kitchen knife was "incompatible" with the main wound and "impossible" for the other wounds. This meant that the prosecutions own investigators didn't believe the knife had anything to do with the crime. Well, Nadeau changes her tone her and begins describing the knife as worthless evidence for the prosecution and she goes on to attack the defense and the US media as though they spent way too much time focusing on it. In other words, Nadeau, is implying that the knife was not a big part of the case. However, this is not entirely true. The Prosecution may have backed off the knife a bit but they never conceded it was not the murder weapon and they referenced it throughout the case. Also, in Nadeau's own publicity appearance for THIS BOOK, she responds to a question about the lack of DNA evidence against Knox in the case saying, "It's a myth that there is no DNA evidence. The double DNA is knife is a key piece of evidence against Knox." Why would she say the knife is important when she is pushing her book in which she writes the knife was useless. Very confusing.

-More confusion comes from her relationship with the media in general. Nadeau goes to great lengths to point out that the Knox family would only give exclusives to reporters who were favorable to them. As such Nadeau believes this led to a mass separation of the media and makes little indictment of the circus it was to begin with. Furthermore it was ironic because she also admits that the Prosecution used the media in EXACTLY the same manner. Nadeau flaunts her close personal relationships with the lead prosecutor as well as many other characters from the Prosecutions side. From this she claims she had unlimited access to the Prosecutor's office. She also spends many pages documenting how the Knox family publicity machine was mean to her, ironically giving her motive to write an Anti-Knox book. What Nadeau never seems to realize is that this candid reporting hurts her credibility. Her being so close to the Prosecution just lumps her in with the other reporters who were being spoon fed by one side or the other. Nadeau clearly didn't want to "bite the hand that fed her." This is clear when she attempts to humanize Mignini, the lead prosecutor that has become such a villain in the American press. Nadeau claims he is not the Monster that Knox or Douglas Preston make him out to be but that he isn't a Saint either. She even cracks a joke that he has a quirk that causes him to suspect Satanism as the root cause of crime a little too often. I was completely floored by this. The Defense argued that Mignini's obsession with Satanic cults drove him to misunderstand the case and mislead investigators down the wrong path, ultimately to the wild assumptions about Knox and Solecito. Instead Nadeau turns the tables, insisting that this was unfair to the Prosecutor YET she completely agrees he is oddly over obsessed with Satanic cults. Nadeau is inadvertently confirming the Defenses case.

There are a lot more examples of Nadeau's misleading statements and contradictions. She dedicates an entire chapter to her own hypothesis of the murder. This hypothesis contains so many baseless claims and assertions as well as inaccuracies it becomes clear to me Nadeau is so biased she is willing to spread false information.

For instance she admits that Knox and Solecito left his place after 9 pm but she never acknowledges why she knows this or that Solecito was believed to shower at his place (she argues he... Read more ›

66 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars tabloid nonsense, March 7, 2011

By 

Dr. C. D. Connaughton (London, London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Angel Face: Sex, Murder and the Inside Story of Amanda Knox (Paperback)

THIS BOOK IS LIBELLOUS, IN ITS TITLE AND CONTENTS. IT SHOULD BE WITHDRAWN IMMEDIATELY.

This book is tabloid journalism. It is apparent that there is no in depth research behind the book. But there is a lot of nonsense in it. The most notable is the fantasy scenario that the author proposes for the events which occurred on the night of the murder. There is not a shred of evidence for this fantasy and it does harm to the cause of unravelling the truth of the sorry affair.

It is clear to me that a miscarriage of justice has occurred, and that it is due to some extent to tabloid journalism such as this book represents.

The title of this book is most misleading.

I recommend considering a different view, by reading at least one of the following:- 'Injustice in Perugia' by Bruce Fisher, 'Murder in Italy' by Candace Dempsey, and 'The Monster of Perugia - The Framing of Amanda Knox' by Mark Waterbury.

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Um okay whatever, October 4, 2011

By 

akornroach - See all my reviews

This review is from: Angel Face: The True Story of Student Killer Amanda Knox (Paperback)

As a professional historical researcher, I can tell you that this book is a joke and should be given no more credit than a tabloid. The author is beyond bias. Barbie has written this book to be one sided and furthers her anti-Amanda sentiment. She blatantly ignored evident showing that Amanda may not have taken part in the murder. This "book" can best be described as a tabloid. If you know all the facts about the case then read the books..... its good for a laugh and it only costs 1.99 now. However, if you know little about the case then DO NOT rely on this terrible excuse for a book as the truth. Additionally, most of the things Barbie claims as FACTS in this book have been proved otherwise in Amanda Knox's appeal.