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Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case (Melville House Classic Journalism) Paperback – January 1, 2008

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Product Details

  • Series: Melville House Classic Journalism
  • Paperback: 100 pages
  • Publisher: Melville House (January 1, 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1933633298
  • ISBN-13: 978-1933633299
  • Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.4 x 7.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,123,163 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful By W. Flood on April 30, 2010
Format: Paperback
A.M. Rosenthal's take on the Kitty Genovese murder remains wildly exaggerated, even after numerous other sources have shown that some witnesses DID 'get involved', and that the few witnesses didn't know exactly what they had seen.

Editor A.M. Rosenthal likely wrote the lead for his reporter's original article, which said 38 people "watched" the attack go on as Kitty screamed. It just ain't true. All reliable accounts (including the prosecutor) put the number at fewer than a dozen, with perhaps half that number actually seeing or hearing anything significant.

Kitty was NOT murdered in "full view" of ANY witness, and she didn't scream for 'over an hour'. No witness saw the entire attack. There were actually two separate attacks (the killer fled for a period of time, and Kitty walked away), and they did not span more than 35 minutes. It is unlikely Kitty would have screamed after the initial attack, in which she was stabbed in the lungs (causing her death by asphyxiation.)

There might have been a brief few minutes when one of her neighbors might have done something that might have saved her life - if they had known she had been stabbed, if they had known that it was something other than 'a lover's quarrel', and if the cops had shown up and been able to find her in time. But Rosenthal's urban morality tale is wildly inaccurate and unfair to an entire neighborhood. And he's more concerned with those neighbors than with Kitty herself. He never tells HER story. Kitty deserves better.
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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful By Mark B. Cohen on March 7, 2007
Format: Paperback
On March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was a single woman of 28 years who worked as a bartender and lived by herself in the Kew Gardens section of the Queens borough of New York City. She was killed, in three separate attacks in three separate places, over a period of one half hour by a man she had never met, one Winston Moseley, who was married, employed, and who upon being captured had no official criminal record but confessed to two other murders. Between her death and his capture, he committed three other robberies.

The author, a well known columnist, editor, and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, does not ask or answer typical journalistic questions. We learn nothing about Kitty Genovese's educational record, employment history, love life, family life, religious or community activities, etc. He notes her lack of prominence, and that her death initially received a mere four paragraphs in the New York Times.

What we learn instead is that her cries for help in the middle of the night led thirty-eight people to watch her being fatally stabbed, and the reaction of 37 of them was to treat her ongoing murder as a bad television show that could safely be turned off. None of the 37 called the police. The 38th witness first went to someone else's apartment so his calls could not be traced to him, called a friend for advice, and then, after she was dead, called the police, who came within two minutes.

Some of the people in the neighborhood casually knew Ms. Genovese, but not well enough to spring into action. The author sees them mainly as apathetic, but also as alienated from the community of which they were a part and somewhat indifferent to the fate of their fellow citizens.
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13 of 17 people found the following review helpful By Pranay Gupte on August 26, 1999
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
Abe Rosenthal is the greatest editor opf his generation, a man who transformed The New York Times and modern-day journalism. Earlier, he was a wonderful foreign correspondent, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from Poland. This book, written when he was metropolitan editor of The Times, is about one of the most gruesome urban tragedies to occur in New York. This book needs no review. It simply needs to be read, and its lessons remembered by all of us.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful By Stacy Helton on August 24, 2012
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
THIRTY-EIGHT WITNESSES was mentioned in some article that I recently read, though I forget which one and what it was about; I am just now on the April VANITY FAIRS so it could now be some old issue. That being said, this slim 1964 non-fiction (billed on the cover as "classic journalism") is more of a thesis then a book, despite being written by A.M. Rosenthal, the former editor of THE NEW YORK TIMES. The subject matter is an important, not a true crime book per se, but more of a sociological mediation on the "thirty-eight" witnesses. In March 1964 Kitty Genovese was coming home for work early in the morning when she was stabbed repeatedly over thirty minutes, with none of the neighbors, who heard the screaming, calling the police. This has been referred to in sociology as "the bystander effect" or "Genovese Syndrome," a social psychological phenomenon. When the book was written the perpetrator was in jail but there was no more information; basic internet digging shows that he is still in prison and eligible for parole in 2013; but the book is not about the crime itself but about the apathy of the witnesses. Arguments are pondered as to why, but this seems to be a turning point in the "urban jungle" where the stoop neighborliness of the 1950s ends, just as Camelot did months earlier. Because we know more is 2012 than Rosenthal knew in 1964 the book lacks an all-encompassing view. For instance, we now know about dialing 911 and emergency services, but Rosenthal goes on a lengthy - and tedious - aside about how emergency calls are routed in other major cities, from Atlanta to Seattle. The book has photos of the neighborhood with diagrams of where the multiple stabbings happened. The book isn't about Genovese - she was merely the victim in this Big Apple morality tale. An interesting read, though dry and a bit academic, but a must for fellow Sociologists.
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