Victim: The Other Side of Murder - Softcover

Kinder, Gary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0871137356 ISBN 13: 9780871137357

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999

Synopsis

Now a classic of true crime, Victim is a compelling and tragic look at how lives can be changed forever by a random act of violence. During an armed robbery, several hostages were brutally tortured, shot in the head, and left for dead. Victim focuses on the members of one family -- including a mother who died after the attack and a son who was left barely alive -- as they fought for his survival and struggled to rebuild their lives. Victim was the first book to go beyond the headlines and statistics about violent crime, to tell the victims' dramatic story of love, loss and courage. It remains one of the most influential books in the victims' rights movement and has become required reading in criminology courses across the country. It may be more relevant now than ever. "Victim is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood turned inside out." -- Newsweek; "Just as Capote did, Kinder has somehow created a story that is truer than true." -- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

About this title

Review:

First published in 1980, Victim was, and remains, a landmark turning point in the then-newly emerging victim's rights movement. When Gary Kinder (who would achieve even more fame and bestsellerdom in the 1990s with Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea) wrote this littérature vérité account of an execution-style bloodbath during an armed robbery, his emphasis on the victims' perspectives changed the true crime genre forever.

In 1974 two men walked into an Ogden, Utah, music store called the Hi-Fi Shop and took the manager and his assistant hostage while they methodically robbed the store. During the course of the robbery, three other people--16-year-old Cortney Naisbitt, his mother, and the father of the store's manager--walked in by chance and were also taken hostage. Before the end of the ordeal, the hostages would be forced to drink Drano ("It's some kind of German chemical that makes you sleep," one of the killers tells them), one of them would be repeatedly raped, another would have a pencil kicked into his ear with such force that it bulged out at his throat, and three of the hostages would die from close-range gunshot wounds. Naisbitt would effectively spend the rest of his life attempting to recover from brain damage, paralysis, and the loss of his mother, shot dead as she lay on the ground next to him. It's almost incidental to the story to note that the killers were quickly discovered and brought to justice before eventually garnering death sentences. Most of Victim is concerned with Cortney Naisbitt's second-by-second struggle to remain alive ("No Code," an ER physician writes on his chart, meaning no attempts to resuscitate him should he stop breathing), and the equally grim battle of his relatives to tape back together the ripped tapestry of their lives. Utterly compelling from first paragraph to last, this edition contains Kinder's 1990 update. --Tjames Madison

About the Author:

Gary Kinder is the author of the best-selling books Victim and Light Years. He began researching this story in 1987 and was aboard the "Arctic Discoverer" in 1989, when Thompson announced his find to the public. Gary Kinder lives in Seattle with his wife and two daughters. He teaches advanced writing seminars to lawyers across the country.

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0871137356
• ISBN 13: 9780871137357
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 322