Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Many powerful truths..., September 3, 2006
Please ignore the hostile reviews for this book. They appear to have been written by Ramsey supporters, and are therefore hopelessly biased.
The book is excellent, and one of the most pertinent truths relates to the way the Ramseys dehumanized their 'lady mannequin', and in hypersexualizing their tiny six-year-old princess, they not only put her on show for every pedophile to lust over, they also gave her a distorted sense of body image - one of Davis's critical points.
With regard to the propaganda about 'the real killer', the reviewers appear to be talking about John Mark Karr, who was cleared of involvement in the JonBenet killing. The guy was a nut job.
The other gross inaccuracy is the claim that 'the evidence' supports the Intruder theory, thus clearing the Ramseys.
No, there has never ever been ANY clear evidence of an intruder. The only 'clues' that might have been factors were debunked years ago. It was effectively impossible for a killer who had such close and prolonged contact with the child, to not leave ANY certain DNA traces.
There was no intruder.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The American Family, November 13, 2003
By A Customer
An Evening with JonBenét Ramsey examines mental, physical, and sexual abuse. This is not a whodunit but rather a why did it happen. As the accompanying essay "There Is Another Court" asserts, legally, we cannot know what happened to this child, but, psychologically, we can. The play presents a theory of the traumatic family, not of the Ramseys, but of the American family at the end of the century in which our culture has wed sexuality and deathwork. The Bradys portrayed here are not the whitewashed bunch we nostalgically dream of being, but rather the perverse, if not psychotic, nightmare reality that undergirds such dreams as ours. This is what George and Martha of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? could have turned into had they actually had children. The play operates on two levels, in two times. On one level, in the past, the play presents a psychoanalytical theory of why parents abuse their children: the parent who does not know how to mourn the death of one child irrepressibly demands solace from the other child and the parent who lives in a state of shattered dreams (and broken sexuality) vents an uncontrollable rage at the child for simply being full of innocent potential. In their inability to confront the death of their (hopeless) dream of being, the parents foreclose upon compassion and install a perverse cruelty as the way they relate to their children. On the second level, in the future, the play portrays the psyche of one who has survived this cruelty. The child victim grows up to become a tragic, existentialist heroine, forever doomed to tap into the cruel deathwork implicit in her subsequent sexual relationships as well as exposing her parents for the aggressive and violent narcissists that they truly are.
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
asking the right questions, March 14, 2005
I just finished teaching this play to a group of college sophomores in a unit dealing with beauty and the body, and almost to a person, they found Davis' play (and collateral essays) to raise some decisive and thought-provoking questions.
The play gets us to consider the possible consequences of having four and five year girls participate in beauty pageants that clearly sexualize them. What do these pageants do to the way such girls perceive their bodies? What might be the long term effects of having children perform in this way at such a young age? For whom are they really performing? How will they conceive or approach romantic intimacy?
Davis' play examines these issues by way of the famous, unsolved murder of JonBenet Ramsey, but the fish he is out to hook is actually much bigger. The play and essays go right to the heart of the way parents foist their own desires violently onto their children, the way our society stresses beauty, sexual allure and competition from the earliest of ages, and the way we have not yet really begun to contemplate or grieve over this phenomenon. Read this book next to Toni Morrison's _The Bluest Eye_ or Lucy Grealy's _Autobiography of a Face_ and you'll begin to see how corrosive our ideas about beauty really are--and how literature can give us the means to examine critically some truly disturbing trends.
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