Book-It 'o13! Book #14
The Fifty Books Challenge, year four! (Years one, two, three, and four just in case you're curious.) This was a library request.
Title: Buried Memories: Katie Beers' Story by Katie Beers and Carolyn Gusoff
Details: Copyright 2013, Titletown Publishing
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Buried Memories: Katie Beers Story is a never-before-told true story of survival, memory and recovery. A profoundly neglected and abused child even before she was kidnapped and locked in an underground box for 17 days. With strength and smarts, she slipped the bonds of captivity and began a new life. Katie Beers, now a married working mother, breaks her 20-year public silence to reveal the inspiring story of her torment and recovery to the television reporter who, as part of the original media frenzy covering the case, sought the key to her remarkable strength.
The kidnapping of Katie Beers made worldwide headlines in late 1992, As details emerged daily about Katie's pre-kidnapping life of neglect and sexual abuse, public outrage grew over the failure of suburban institutions and the Long Island community to have helped her. The kidnapping is the exclamation point at the end of a tragic childhood.
Katie, at the center of a national media storm, dropped out of sight twenty years ago and has never been heard from publicly. The telling of her story, upon the 20th anniversary of her rescue, offers enlightening hindsight into what enabled Katie to overcome a lost childhood. The book includes never-before told details of her ordeal and the shocking discovery of never-before-heard audio tapes recorded by the kidnapper during her captivity."
Why I Wanted to Read It: This was recommended to me after finishing Damien Echols's memoir.
How I Liked It: Oddly, I had never actually heard of Katie Beers, or if I had, I certainly didn't remember it. For the way that this books hype's the case, one would expect an almost OJ-level of coverage from the media.
But that aside, the premise is fascinating. My interest in the survival of Jaycee Duggard would make a book like this naturally intriguing.
I saw it had a writer besides the victim at the center of the case, and I immediately feared for a ghost-writer (I dislike ghost-writers since it's generally too hard to discern where the "first-billed" author's voice begins and ends). So I was happy to discover that the reporter who shares co-author credit apparently keeps her sections separate from those of Beers. Both stories are told in the first person by their authors.
I was for this idea (again, since it removed the ghost-writer concept, or so I thought) until I got going. I haven't seen a book that's screamed "SELF-PUBLISHED" in quite some time. Grammatical and spelling errors litter the text and one gets the feeling that a better editor would've nixed the "Katie's story and then Carolyn's story" idea.
The layout of the back-and-forth narrative is jarring, if for no other reason than Carolyn Gusoff seeks to make it as much a memoir about herself than about Beers. Surely, her own remembrances of covering the story belong here. But to the extent of the space that they occupy (we get a vast array of "insider" information about the news business, including Gusoff's opinions on doing her own hair, working with cameras, and finagling more space) is ridiculous. Certain areas are Gusoff's alone to cover, such as interviewing Beers's biological mother and the detective who worked the case and became a father figure to Beers (and his reveal of the audio tapes made of Beers in captivity). Frankly, Gusoff's writing is so weak, she needs a ghostwriter. Her sections, even those relevant to the actual case, lag with cheap prose and clumsy storytelling.
The section that I would wager most people that pick up this book have come to hear, the story of Katie Beers, is fascinating, but nearly impossible to sift through amongst Gusoff's sections. Particularly interesting (and/or jarring) is Beers's adoption by a conservative Christian family, where given certain parts of the text, she appears to have traded some old misogynies for new ones (she praises her first boyfriend "doing the proper thing" in asking her parents for her hand in marriage before asking her to marry him, and talks about getting beyond her own guilt at her housekeeping when her husband tells her that there are dirty dishes in the sink). She also has a number of dragging prejudices that would be also interesting (if, again, disturbing) to study. Both her "godmother" (whose husband regularly physically and sexually abused her) and biological mother were very heavy-set women, and somehow in the course of Beers's text, she gets to associating "fat" with "evil" and/or "ugly". She devotes as much time in her writing about not becoming that with which she was raised to "fat" as she does to the gross abuse and neglect she overcame with her own children.
The book could've been truly fascinating with a different editor (or several) and Gusoff's writing being reigned in, but as it is, it's more about the bloated ego of a reporter than the first-person account and survival of child abuse.
Notable: While Beers may be excused on some level for her fatphobia, however misplaced, Gosoff takes it up as well, using it (perhaps even borrowing it) to describe Beers's abusers and her mother in a fashion where it's nearly a substitute, again, for "ugly". What's more disturbing is her meeting with Beers's biological mother where she even manages to insult Beers's biological mother for the fact she's no longer fat.
"She appeared to have lost most her enormous weight and the skin on her arms hung loosely like sleeves where rolls of fat used to reside." (pg 169)
It's just those things that strike you like when someone goes out of their way to describe a criminal's race/ethnicity and keeps repeating it.
Title: Buried Memories: Katie Beers' Story by Katie Beers and Carolyn Gusoff
Details: Copyright 2013, Titletown Publishing
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Buried Memories: Katie Beers Story is a never-before-told true story of survival, memory and recovery. A profoundly neglected and abused child even before she was kidnapped and locked in an underground box for 17 days. With strength and smarts, she slipped the bonds of captivity and began a new life. Katie Beers, now a married working mother, breaks her 20-year public silence to reveal the inspiring story of her torment and recovery to the television reporter who, as part of the original media frenzy covering the case, sought the key to her remarkable strength.
The kidnapping of Katie Beers made worldwide headlines in late 1992, As details emerged daily about Katie's pre-kidnapping life of neglect and sexual abuse, public outrage grew over the failure of suburban institutions and the Long Island community to have helped her. The kidnapping is the exclamation point at the end of a tragic childhood.
Katie, at the center of a national media storm, dropped out of sight twenty years ago and has never been heard from publicly. The telling of her story, upon the 20th anniversary of her rescue, offers enlightening hindsight into what enabled Katie to overcome a lost childhood. The book includes never-before told details of her ordeal and the shocking discovery of never-before-heard audio tapes recorded by the kidnapper during her captivity."
Why I Wanted to Read It: This was recommended to me after finishing Damien Echols's memoir.
How I Liked It: Oddly, I had never actually heard of Katie Beers, or if I had, I certainly didn't remember it. For the way that this books hype's the case, one would expect an almost OJ-level of coverage from the media.
But that aside, the premise is fascinating. My interest in the survival of Jaycee Duggard would make a book like this naturally intriguing.
I saw it had a writer besides the victim at the center of the case, and I immediately feared for a ghost-writer (I dislike ghost-writers since it's generally too hard to discern where the "first-billed" author's voice begins and ends). So I was happy to discover that the reporter who shares co-author credit apparently keeps her sections separate from those of Beers. Both stories are told in the first person by their authors.
I was for this idea (again, since it removed the ghost-writer concept, or so I thought) until I got going. I haven't seen a book that's screamed "SELF-PUBLISHED" in quite some time. Grammatical and spelling errors litter the text and one gets the feeling that a better editor would've nixed the "Katie's story and then Carolyn's story" idea.
The layout of the back-and-forth narrative is jarring, if for no other reason than Carolyn Gusoff seeks to make it as much a memoir about herself than about Beers. Surely, her own remembrances of covering the story belong here. But to the extent of the space that they occupy (we get a vast array of "insider" information about the news business, including Gusoff's opinions on doing her own hair, working with cameras, and finagling more space) is ridiculous. Certain areas are Gusoff's alone to cover, such as interviewing Beers's biological mother and the detective who worked the case and became a father figure to Beers (and his reveal of the audio tapes made of Beers in captivity). Frankly, Gusoff's writing is so weak, she needs a ghostwriter. Her sections, even those relevant to the actual case, lag with cheap prose and clumsy storytelling.
The section that I would wager most people that pick up this book have come to hear, the story of Katie Beers, is fascinating, but nearly impossible to sift through amongst Gusoff's sections. Particularly interesting (and/or jarring) is Beers's adoption by a conservative Christian family, where given certain parts of the text, she appears to have traded some old misogynies for new ones (she praises her first boyfriend "doing the proper thing" in asking her parents for her hand in marriage before asking her to marry him, and talks about getting beyond her own guilt at her housekeeping when her husband tells her that there are dirty dishes in the sink). She also has a number of dragging prejudices that would be also interesting (if, again, disturbing) to study. Both her "godmother" (whose husband regularly physically and sexually abused her) and biological mother were very heavy-set women, and somehow in the course of Beers's text, she gets to associating "fat" with "evil" and/or "ugly". She devotes as much time in her writing about not becoming that with which she was raised to "fat" as she does to the gross abuse and neglect she overcame with her own children.
The book could've been truly fascinating with a different editor (or several) and Gusoff's writing being reigned in, but as it is, it's more about the bloated ego of a reporter than the first-person account and survival of child abuse.
Notable: While Beers may be excused on some level for her fatphobia, however misplaced, Gosoff takes it up as well, using it (perhaps even borrowing it) to describe Beers's abusers and her mother in a fashion where it's nearly a substitute, again, for "ugly". What's more disturbing is her meeting with Beers's biological mother where she even manages to insult Beers's biological mother for the fact she's no longer fat.
"She appeared to have lost most her enormous weight and the skin on her arms hung loosely like sleeves where rolls of fat used to reside." (pg 169)
It's just those things that strike you like when someone goes out of their way to describe a criminal's race/ethnicity and keeps repeating it.