11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Penetrating Look At the Ugly Face of Apathy, Alienation, and Indifference, March 7, 2007
This review is from: Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case, With A New Introduction (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.
The focus of the New York Times on the 38 witnesses who did not act in a timely fashion made this a national news story. Other similar stories of apathy, alienation, and indifference around the world came to light.
Some New Yorkers blamed the police for slow response time, probing personal questions of complainants, and disrespectful treatment of callers, saying that the poor record of the New York Police Department was the reason that people did not call. The New York Times diligently investigated the various methods used by other urban police departments to receive citizen calls, and successfully joined the Police Department's ultimately successful attempt to have a citywide emergency number.
But none of the 38 used that excuse. Those willing to talk to the press expressed apathy, fear of consequences, fear of involvement, reluctant spouses,and other similar reasons that look petty and inconsequential when one considers that a life was lost. Before they began to consider the press interest in their decisions to be harassing and advisable to avoid, they told the New York Times that they had learned from their experience and would not do it again.
To his credit, the author does not get on a high horse. He notes that he had turned away beggars repeatedly, beggars in obviously poor health and desperate financial circumstances. He makes it clear that the key question of the Genovese case--what degree of sacrifice do we owe others?--is a question that applies him and to all Americans as well as the 38 witnesses.
Sparing us extraneous details of Kitty Genovese's life, this book is an ethical and moral classic. It belongs in ethics courses at all levels.
It is also a classic book on the decay of urban communities. It does not ask or answer questions about the role the Genovese case played in middle class flight out of New York and other cities, but it clearly played a supporting role in the fear-based migration. This book belongs in urban studies courses and courses in criminology where the social effects of crime are considered.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extraordinary tale, written by a great journalist, August 26, 1999
This review is from: Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case, With A New Introduction (Paperback)
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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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Decades of inaccuracy, April 30, 2010
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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