Customer Reviews

An Evening With JonBenet Ramsey

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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.

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.

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.

I have a difficult time watching movies or reading stories that contain painful or troubling images because those images tend to stay with me for a long, long time. So for me to read a serious literary work on an emotionally provocative topic, it has to be extremely good, extremely worth the pain, or I won't do it. Toni Morrison and William Faulkner, I have found, are always worth the pain. In fact, they have taught me that letting myself feel pain in order to know something of the pain my fellow human beings have come through, is an honorable endeavor. That's how I feel about AN EVENING WITH JONBENET RAMSEY. Davis's play, and the commentaries that follow it, have taught me so much about the human heart--both about its most frightening capacities and about its most courageous possibilities--that I feel a better person for having read it.

"Cowboy's Sweetheart," gives voice to one who cannot speak, to the unspeakable. Davis has "psyched out" the JonBenet Ramsey case, seized its most egregious possibilities, then "fleshed" it out as drama, creating a psyche that could bear the burden of his conception. The play presents a slain child`s destiny was she somehow to mature into womanhood. The burden is the incestuous family dynamics though which a child's life is lost. With an uncompromising weave of details that resonate with the now familiar investigations, public disclosures and denials of the JonBenet Ramsey case, Jolie relives what it was like for the child, what became of her, and how it is with her now: her LIFE story. "Cowboy's Sweetheart" is her `tour de force,' her "evening," when everything can be told, is told, with disturbing, shameless, candor and the poignancy of long-suffering. The night with her mother and the fatal assault is recollected. Then come, equally unbearable, scenes from ages twelve and fifteen, as she outgrows incestuous relations with the father. A mature woman emerges from the crucible of sexually charged experiences. First the end and then beginning of the affair that made the difference, her soul-forming five years with Josh, are epitomized in utter intimacy. Closure comes--when Jolie is forty-five--with inevitable family confrontation. Jolie, who has asked no pity from her audience, is "the stone guest," pitiless as the truth. An actress who can carry this role must make the impossible credible, make the unconscionable endurable.

John Fowles wrote this startling sentence: "Wholesight: or all the rest is desolation." In our time, certainly a time of desolation, do not all of us search for "wholesight"? But what would wholesight be like if we found it? We know it would combine the imagination's ability to project and explore existential and emotional possibilities with reason's ability to deal with the recalcitrant world of facts. What is so surprising and original with Walter A. Davis's book, An Evening with JonBenet Ramsey, is that he shows us "wholesight" in two forms: as art and as essay.

For those familiar with the comforts of partial perspectives, Davis's play is sure to be misinterpreted. His dramatic projection of JonBenet's life into a future gives us insights impossible in any other way; insights every bit as real as any of the facts he has so meticulously researched. In this short space, all I can say is that for those willing to undergo the demands, or what Davis calls the "agon" of real art, the play is an experience of exceptional power.

I found the essays, as orginal, and in some ways, as powerful as the play. For once again, they show this elusive qualilty of "wholesight": not just showing multiple perspectives, but a fusion of perspectives. Read the essays and you will see what I mean.

If you are, like me, in search of a new way of thinking about the issues of our time, even in search of a new ethic--one based on wholesight, then you cannot find a better, more exemplary work.

This book is a waste of time! It is disgusting and made me sick. I can't believe I wasted my money on this!

This book in no way portrayed an accurate description of the real life of Jonbenet Ramsey or what her life would have truly been like had she survived. It appears more an attempt to attach a famous name to an unknown writer. If the purpose was to bring to light the true horrors of child sexual abuse and its exploitation in the media, the point would have been better served by using an example that is not cut from whole cloth and derived directly from the media which it condemns. The Ramsey case will eventually be widely known as the case that was extensively tried inacurately in the media as much as for the murder itself. I found the book disappointing and don't believe the cause of child sexual abuse was furthered in any way.

Warning: this book is not for the faint of heart. Having read an early draft of Davis' play a few years ago, I risk sounding melodramatic when I truthfully state that I was driven toward a nervous breakdown. Davis' passion is intense, his words raw, his images searing. For anybody who is at all interested in trauma and its effects on language--and vice versa--this book is a necessity.

Compelling...don't want to read/believe...but must to see/hear the truth in regards to JonBenet...!!!EXCELLENT READ!!! A MUST!!!