Book-It 'o13! Book #22
The Fifty Books Challenge, year four! (Years one, two, three, and four just in case you're curious.) This was a library request.
Title: Waiting to Be Heard: a Memoir by Amanda Knox
Details: Copyright 2013, HarperCollins Publishers
Synopsis (By Way of Front and Back Flaps): "In November 2007, Amanda Knox was twenty years old and had been studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, for only a few weeks when her friend and roommate, a young English student named Meredith Kercher, was brutally murdered. The investigation made headlines around the world, and Amanda's arrest placed her at the center of a media firestorm. Young, naïve, grieving at the horrifying death of her friend, and with little more than basic knowledge of the Italian language, she was subjected to harsh interrogations during which she struggled to understand the police and to make her own words understood. The subsequent trial exposed Amanda to international scrutiny and speculation, and she became a tabloid staple. In 2009, after an extremely controversial trial, she was wrongly convicted of murder. But in October 2011, after Amanda had spent four years in an Italian prison, and following a lengthy appeals process, the conviction was overturned. Amanda immediately flew home to the United States.
Now, in Waiting to Be Heard, Amanda Knox shares for the very first time the truth about her terrifying ordeal. Drawing from journals she kept and letters she wrote during her incarceration, Amanda gives an unflinching and deeply personal account of her harrowing experience, from the devastation of her friend's murder to the series of mistakes and misunderstandings that led to her arrest. She speaks intimately about what it was like, at the age of twenty, to find herself imprisoned in a foreign country for a crime she did not commit and demonized by the international media, and about the impact on her family and loved ones as they traveled back and forth to be at her side so that she would not be alone. She describes the relationships that bloomed with those who believed in her innocence and how the strength of her family helped her survive the most challenging time of her young life. With grace and gratitude, Amanda describes the aftermath of the trial and her return home to the States, where she is able once again to look forward to the future.
A young woman's soul-baring account of a nightmare turned real, of unimaginable horror and the miscarriage of justice that ensued, and, ultimately, of fortitude in the face of overwhelming adversity, Waiting to Be Heard is a memoir unlike any you have ever read."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I'd seen a few documentaries about this case and from the framing, I knew that I was going to have to wait for the "insider" book/s, and sure enough, this came along.
How I Liked It: I've discussed before about my hesitance in judging how a survivor (of anything) commits a memoir. I temper that hesitance with the common sense that this is a book published, not a journal, and is such open to scrutiny.
The facts generally accepted are that British student Meredith Kercher was raped and murdered by drifter Rudy Guede and probably an accomplice (Guede allegedly approached another inmate in prison for legal advice and confessed the details of the murder, which included a male accomplice that accompanied him to Kercher to coerce her into group sex; she refused, resulting in her murder). Knox, a hapless and naive American, stumbled in all the right ways and made an easy target for the police and prosecution, their greatest arguments against her being her alleged "promiscuity" and her cracking under pressure (also the language barrier as Knox wasn't anything close to fluent and was under duress), willing to tell the police apparently anything. This is not uncommon in false confessions. A mistranslation of a slang in a text message ("See you later" is not a casual, non-literal expression in Italian) to her employer brought him into the investigation and with some (or quite a bit of) coercion and suggestion by police (including that her grief may have blocked out the memory, a common tactic in interrogations), earned an arrest of her boss Patrick Lumumba.
A crushing international media tide, helped along by the fact the public prosecutor is apparently a notorious conspiracy theorist (he's worked in many other cases) who cooked up a theory of a Satanic sexual rite in which Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito coerced Kercher into attending (also in attendance was Guede, which was a little off for the scenario, but the pesky fact of his obvious involvement shoehorned him in) which included her murder, and of course Knox's much-discussed looks and sex life (advocates for Knox's imprisonment tend to focus disproportionately on her sexual activity), fairly guaranteed it'd be hard to get any kind of fair trial, let alone without barring jurors from viewing outside media about the case during the trial (it's an American legal procedure, not an Italian one). Eventually, when the media crush died down, a second, more prepared trial, exposed the various flaws of the investigative team and Knox (and Sollecito) were acquitted.
This is quite a story and one that, again, I realized was probably only really worth hearing at this level from one of the defendants.
Knox's story (apparently with help by ghostwriter Linda Kulman) is both a tall order and a seemingly easy one. By the title, Knox is getting to finally tell her side of the story in a story so manipulated and sensationalized that the image of Knox was hardly human (some of the more lurid Italian publications dub her as a kind of blood-thirsty succubus).
Both go about telling Knox's story carefully, realizing that it's going to be heavily analyzed. As such, it comes across frequently as dry and procedural. So many human touches, Knox's interaction with other prisoners, her time spent pondering her fate (even a briefly suicidal period), the joyous reunion with her family, all come across as documented rather than expressed. As though realizing that Knox's humanity is a concern, there is some assertion that's awkward in the way a genuinely goofy person would then have to profess to being a goofy person that turns up towards the beginning of the book, which doesn't so much as humanize and endear the reader to Knox as induce cringing (although it does make extremely plausible much of the so-called bizarre behavior Knox exhibited under pressure, including an interlude that occurs while stretching between lengthy and brutal interrogations, and being chatted up by a friendly guard who asks her if she does yoga and, apparently so relieved for positive interaction, she actually demonstrates).
Still, it's a compelling read and does give insight (however dry) into one at the center of a media storm where freedom is at stake and seemingly at the hands of the latest tabloid.
Notable: To say that there is misogyny inherent in Knox's casting as suspect and in her conviction is redundant, but the level one finds the deeper one goes is almost dizzying. Not only is Knox apparently capable of the slaughter of not only another human being but a roommate because she owned a vibrator (a gag gift from a friend), her motive for murdering Kercher apparently stemmed from a deep-seated "jealousy" over Kercher's "purity", a purity Knox herself apparently lacked. A woman capable of sex with more than one man in her lifetime is, to read the prosecution's arguments, a woman capable of murder. Surely Knox could've been cast as a murderer without her sexuality coming into question? But that begs the question of any woman accused of murder (whether guilty or innocent) when their character is being questioned, why does her sex life (whatever it may be) almost inevitably arise as "relevant"? Knox is a stark example, but there are certainly others and it poses a plethora of both questions and assessments of our society.
Title: Waiting to Be Heard: a Memoir by Amanda Knox
Details: Copyright 2013, HarperCollins Publishers
Synopsis (By Way of Front and Back Flaps): "In November 2007, Amanda Knox was twenty years old and had been studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, for only a few weeks when her friend and roommate, a young English student named Meredith Kercher, was brutally murdered. The investigation made headlines around the world, and Amanda's arrest placed her at the center of a media firestorm. Young, naïve, grieving at the horrifying death of her friend, and with little more than basic knowledge of the Italian language, she was subjected to harsh interrogations during which she struggled to understand the police and to make her own words understood. The subsequent trial exposed Amanda to international scrutiny and speculation, and she became a tabloid staple. In 2009, after an extremely controversial trial, she was wrongly convicted of murder. But in October 2011, after Amanda had spent four years in an Italian prison, and following a lengthy appeals process, the conviction was overturned. Amanda immediately flew home to the United States.
Now, in Waiting to Be Heard, Amanda Knox shares for the very first time the truth about her terrifying ordeal. Drawing from journals she kept and letters she wrote during her incarceration, Amanda gives an unflinching and deeply personal account of her harrowing experience, from the devastation of her friend's murder to the series of mistakes and misunderstandings that led to her arrest. She speaks intimately about what it was like, at the age of twenty, to find herself imprisoned in a foreign country for a crime she did not commit and demonized by the international media, and about the impact on her family and loved ones as they traveled back and forth to be at her side so that she would not be alone. She describes the relationships that bloomed with those who believed in her innocence and how the strength of her family helped her survive the most challenging time of her young life. With grace and gratitude, Amanda describes the aftermath of the trial and her return home to the States, where she is able once again to look forward to the future.
A young woman's soul-baring account of a nightmare turned real, of unimaginable horror and the miscarriage of justice that ensued, and, ultimately, of fortitude in the face of overwhelming adversity, Waiting to Be Heard is a memoir unlike any you have ever read."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I'd seen a few documentaries about this case and from the framing, I knew that I was going to have to wait for the "insider" book/s, and sure enough, this came along.
How I Liked It: I've discussed before about my hesitance in judging how a survivor (of anything) commits a memoir. I temper that hesitance with the common sense that this is a book published, not a journal, and is such open to scrutiny.
The facts generally accepted are that British student Meredith Kercher was raped and murdered by drifter Rudy Guede and probably an accomplice (Guede allegedly approached another inmate in prison for legal advice and confessed the details of the murder, which included a male accomplice that accompanied him to Kercher to coerce her into group sex; she refused, resulting in her murder). Knox, a hapless and naive American, stumbled in all the right ways and made an easy target for the police and prosecution, their greatest arguments against her being her alleged "promiscuity" and her cracking under pressure (also the language barrier as Knox wasn't anything close to fluent and was under duress), willing to tell the police apparently anything. This is not uncommon in false confessions. A mistranslation of a slang in a text message ("See you later" is not a casual, non-literal expression in Italian) to her employer brought him into the investigation and with some (or quite a bit of) coercion and suggestion by police (including that her grief may have blocked out the memory, a common tactic in interrogations), earned an arrest of her boss Patrick Lumumba.
A crushing international media tide, helped along by the fact the public prosecutor is apparently a notorious conspiracy theorist (he's worked in many other cases) who cooked up a theory of a Satanic sexual rite in which Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito coerced Kercher into attending (also in attendance was Guede, which was a little off for the scenario, but the pesky fact of his obvious involvement shoehorned him in) which included her murder, and of course Knox's much-discussed looks and sex life (advocates for Knox's imprisonment tend to focus disproportionately on her sexual activity), fairly guaranteed it'd be hard to get any kind of fair trial, let alone without barring jurors from viewing outside media about the case during the trial (it's an American legal procedure, not an Italian one). Eventually, when the media crush died down, a second, more prepared trial, exposed the various flaws of the investigative team and Knox (and Sollecito) were acquitted.
This is quite a story and one that, again, I realized was probably only really worth hearing at this level from one of the defendants.
Knox's story (apparently with help by ghostwriter Linda Kulman) is both a tall order and a seemingly easy one. By the title, Knox is getting to finally tell her side of the story in a story so manipulated and sensationalized that the image of Knox was hardly human (some of the more lurid Italian publications dub her as a kind of blood-thirsty succubus).
Both go about telling Knox's story carefully, realizing that it's going to be heavily analyzed. As such, it comes across frequently as dry and procedural. So many human touches, Knox's interaction with other prisoners, her time spent pondering her fate (even a briefly suicidal period), the joyous reunion with her family, all come across as documented rather than expressed. As though realizing that Knox's humanity is a concern, there is some assertion that's awkward in the way a genuinely goofy person would then have to profess to being a goofy person that turns up towards the beginning of the book, which doesn't so much as humanize and endear the reader to Knox as induce cringing (although it does make extremely plausible much of the so-called bizarre behavior Knox exhibited under pressure, including an interlude that occurs while stretching between lengthy and brutal interrogations, and being chatted up by a friendly guard who asks her if she does yoga and, apparently so relieved for positive interaction, she actually demonstrates).
Still, it's a compelling read and does give insight (however dry) into one at the center of a media storm where freedom is at stake and seemingly at the hands of the latest tabloid.
Notable: To say that there is misogyny inherent in Knox's casting as suspect and in her conviction is redundant, but the level one finds the deeper one goes is almost dizzying. Not only is Knox apparently capable of the slaughter of not only another human being but a roommate because she owned a vibrator (a gag gift from a friend), her motive for murdering Kercher apparently stemmed from a deep-seated "jealousy" over Kercher's "purity", a purity Knox herself apparently lacked. A woman capable of sex with more than one man in her lifetime is, to read the prosecution's arguments, a woman capable of murder. Surely Knox could've been cast as a murderer without her sexuality coming into question? But that begs the question of any woman accused of murder (whether guilty or innocent) when their character is being questioned, why does her sex life (whatever it may be) almost inevitably arise as "relevant"? Knox is a stark example, but there are certainly others and it poses a plethora of both questions and assessments of our society.