The Victim's Song [Hardcover]

Alice R. Kaminsky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1985

The unremitting horror of the consequences of violent crime has never been depicted with such relentless honesty and anger as in "The Victim's Song". Eric Kaminsky, a twenty-two-year-old music student was robbed, stabbed in the back, and then thrown on the tracks of a New York City subway, where he died. In this book, Professor Alice R. Kaminsky, Eric's mother, gives a powerful account of this senseless tragedy. She describes the continuing pain she suffers from the loss of her only child and exposes the inadequacies of our flawed criminal justice system in her discussion of the trial of his murderers. This is a shocking book because the author expresses her anger honestly and without offering any of the palliatives of the bereavement books. No one who reads "The Victim's Song" will ever forget the torment experienced by the victims of crime in our increasingly violent society. Nor will anyone who reads "The Victim's Song" ever forget Eric Kaminsky.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Kaminsky's son, Eric, a 22-year-old music student, was murdered during a robbery in the New York City subway. The author, a professor of English, wishes "to inundate the reader with anger," and the first half of the book is an authentic expression of the grief and rage felt by the victims of murder. In the remainder, Kaminsky vents her wrath against the criminal justice system, defense attorneys, death-penalty opponents, New York City and its subway, and Norman Mailer. Marked by uneven and didactic writing, this book is essentially an idiosyncratic outpouring of emotion. Not a necessary purchase. Gregor A. Preston, Univ. of California Lib., Davis
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 268 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books (September 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879752920
• ISBN-13: 978-0879752927
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,589,873 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Articulate, Gripping, and Powerful, December 11, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Victim's Song (Hardcover)

In this chilling account of the murder of her son and subsequent trial of the cold blooded killers who took him from her, Alice Kaminsky makes the strongest argument I have seen in favor of capital punishment. If you have ever felt that executing murderers was somehow immoral, you must read this book. As you progress through this sad, sad all-too-real life tale, you will feel a mother's pain and likely lose whatever small sympathy you might have felt for the killers. I read this book years ago, and have recommended it often. Nobody I know of has been disappointed.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sound of Grief, August 5, 2008

By 

Constant Reader (Citizen of the World) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Victim's Song (Hardcover)

Kaminsky opens with her stated intention of writing at least in part to respond to Mailer's "The Executioner's Song", and I think this is true in more than one respect. Both are frozen -- Mailer in development, Kaminsky in a moment.

Mailer writes about crime, violence and retribution from the perspective of an extremely precocious ninth grader obsesesed with Hitler; he's not himself drawn to commit evil, but he is weirdly blank, like a frat kid rapist, in the area where human empathy should be.

Kaminsky is not blank there, or anywhere. She's a fully functional adult, capable of work and love and empathy. She is, perhaps, stuck in the anger stage of grief. I'm presuming that because so many people have written, painted, danced, and otherwise portrayed or shared their journey through bereavement and horror, that there is indeed a time when, as Anne Lindbergh said, the bereaved try to follow their dead into the underworld; and a time when many, if not most, return -- permanently changed from the journey -- to this life.

I sense that Kaminsky writes from the moment in that underworld in which one can still see the retreating form of the beloved. To imagine 'what if', to see him in the faces and forms of the living, to feel rage against the world, the systems, the ones who did not call, against fate, chance, and life itself -- all this is to keep him in sight. She does not want him to be forgotten; then he is truly gone, vanished from her sight. That will also signal the end of her existence -- or at least of this current existence.

She says she is not one of the forgivers, and this is plainly evident. Many factors contribute to what, all alone, would be too much -- the loss of a child: her own personality, the hideous randomness and horror of the crime, the potential Eric possessed. And so she remains in the place where she can survive.

And I would say that no one, not even those who have passed through remarkably similar hell, has the right to say she should move on. Grief may be universal, in that we all feel it some day, in some way; but it is also entirely individual, and horribly isolating. You do not know if you will survive it, or in what form you will emerge.

I don't think there always has to be a reason to carry on, or that anyone ever really understands the whole process. Death has the power to touch each of us; it will claim each of us even if we don't face it before our own ends. But I do think that its power over the young, though absolute in one sense, fails in another. All children and young people remain, even when they are taken from this life, persistently and eternally about hope, and joy, about survival, about reaching for any chance, about leaping for the sheer happiness of the leap, in defiance of fear and caution.