Tag Archives: book review

book reviews, true crime

Repost: Review of I’m No Monster: The Horrifying True Story of Josef Fritzl

Here’s another reposted review about Josef Fritzl. It was written in September 2014 and appears as/is.

If you’ve been reading this blog recently, you know I’ve been reading about Austria’s infamous Josef Fritzl, a man who imprisoned and raped his daughter, Elisabeth, in an underground cellar for 24 years.  Fritzl had seven children with his wife, Rosemarie, and seven more with Elisabeth, not including one that was miscarried.  Six of Elisabeth’s children are still living.  One of the seven, a twin to her son, Alexander, died just a few days after he was born in the cellar.  Three of Elisabeth’s children were raised above ground, while the two eldest, Kerstin and Stephan, and the youngest, Felix, stayed underground with their mother.

The first book I read about this case was Secrets in the Cellar by John Glatt.  I followed up with I’m No Monster, written by Stefanie Marsh and Bojan Pancevski.  Overall, I think I’m No Monster is the better book, although I did notice there were some typos and errors in it.  For one thing, the authors repeatedly refer to St. Poelten as St. Pollen.  I almost wonder if the word was “spell checked” as they wrote it and they never noticed it.  For another thing, there are some awkward sentence structures in the book that could have used editing.  The writing is also frequently somewhat repetitive.

The information presented within the book, however, is very interesting.  The authors go into more detail about Fritzl’s upbringing that Glatt omitted.  For example, I didn’t know that Josef Fritzl’s mother had spent time in a concentration camp for not housing German officials.  She had been a very cold and abusive woman before she went away, but was much worse when she came back.  Fritzl was supposedly beaten bloody by his mother until he finally got big enough to fight back.  He was left with emotional scars that supposedly drove him to violate his daughter.  He has been quoted as saying he was “born to rape” and having Elisabeth gave him someone to victimize, as sick as it is.  I didn’t get as much of a sense that the authors of I’m No Monster were injecting their own opinions about the case as much as Glatt did, although obviously neither book paints Fritzl in a positive light.   

The authors of I’m No Monster also write about the community of Amstetten, where this crime took place.  It is apparently a very straight-laced kind of town at a perfection junction between Germany and Italy.  It even sounds like the kind of place I might want to visit sometime.

Now that I’ve read two books on Josef Fritzl, I think it may be time to move on to another topic.  I hate to say I enjoy reading about true crime, though I do find the people involved in these cases fascinating.  Josef Fritzl is a liar and a narcissist.  According to this book, he wanted to be studied by the top psychologists and psychiatrists and was even working on his own memoirs…  As if being infamous gives him the right to become a celebrity of sorts.  Maybe reading books about Josef Fritzl is counterproductive in that sense, since it gives criminals notoriety that they don’t deserve.  For me, personally, reading these books offers a glimpse into the mindset of criminals.

Anyway, I would recommend I’m No Monster, though I do think it could have been better written.

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book reviews, true crime

Repost: John Glatt’s Secrets in the Cellar– the horrible story of Josef Fritzl and his double life

Here’s a book review I wrote for my original blog in September 2014. It appears here as/is.

I remember being as shocked as everyone else was in April 2008, when the world became aware of 73 year old retired engineer, Josef Fritzl.  At the time, Bill and I were in the middle of our first time in Germany and I recognized St. Polten, the town where Fritzl was being jailed.  I visited the town by chance in August 1997, on my way home from my Peace Corps assignment in Armenia.  I remembered St. Polten as a charming place, not too far from Vienna.  Now it was in the news because of Josef Fritzl, rapist, kidnapper, and murderer. 

Josef Fritzl, an elderly man who had seemed so brilliant and respectable for most of his life, had just been outed as a monster who had held his daughter, Elisabeth, captive in an underground prison for twenty-four years.  Not only had Fritzl kidnapped his own daughter, he had also repeatedly raped and beaten her.  And he had also made eight children with her, one of whom was miscarried, one who died three days after birth, three who lived underground with Elisabeth, and the other three who were raised by him and his wife, Rosemarie.

Rosemarie, who had also borne seven children with Fritzl, was heartbroken on August 28, 1984, when her daughter Elisabeth went missing.  She was unaware that her husband had built an elaborate dungeon underground on their property in Amstetten, Austria, and that her daughter was underground being raped and tortured.  Fritzl forced Elisabeth to write a letter explaining that she had joined a religious cult and warning her parents not to try to find her.  And Rosemarie, who had always been a very passive soul that never questioned anyone, took Elisabeth at her word.  For some reason, it never occurred to her to question when three of Elisabeth’s seven babies were dropped at her doorstep with notes explaining that she couldn’t take care of them.

Though the Fritzl story is truly horrifying, I am a sucker for true crime.  I decided to read John Glatt’s 2010 book, Secrets in the Cellar, which is about the Fritzl case.  This book turned out to be a real page turner, not so much because of the way it was written, but because this crime is so extraordinary and horrible.  Austria had already been reeling from the story about Natascha Kampusch, a ten year old girl from Vienna who was abducted, beaten, and enslaved by a stranger who kept her in an underground pit for eight years.  As horrible as that story was, Fritzl’s story was far worse.  He was doing these horrible things to his own daughter and the children he forced her to have with him.

Glatt does a good job of explaining how Fritzl came to be the monster that he is.  Fritzl was born in 1935 and raised by an abusive mother who beat him savagely.  As a young boy, he had witnessed firsthand the horrors of Adolf Hitler, but Hitler was apparently less terrifying than his own mother.  Fritzl eventually came to adore and respect her as a “great woman”, even though she was very abusive and controlling.

Josef Fritzl was a handsome man who had a very strong libido.  He was attracted to “nice” girls and dated often, finally settling on Rosemarie, a woman who was very passive and meek.  By Glatt’s account, Fritzl was a very competent engineer who seemed very normal in most ways.  But he ruled his house with an iron fist and was very abusive and cruel to his wife and their children.  Fritzl was also a convicted rapist who frequently hired prostitutes, many of whom later told police about his sick fantasies.  Fritzl may have also been responsible for other unsolved rapes and murders of women.

Elisabeth was Fritzl’s fourth child, born in 1966, and she resembled Fritzl’s mother.  From her birth, Josef Fritzl became obsessed with her.  By the time she was eleven years old, he had started raping her.  Though he let her go to school and even become trained in the culinary arts, he did not want her to date boys.  In August 1984, she was 18 years old and on the brink of escaping him when he asked her to help him move a heavy steel door to his cellar.

As they were moving the door, Fritzl overpowered Elisabeth, covered her nose and mouth with ether, and handcuffed her.  He then moved her to the prison he had spent six years constructing.  She would stay there for 24 years.  Only when Elisabeth’s eldest daughter, Kerstin, became deathly ill did Fritzl finally let Elisabeth and sons Stefan and Felix leave the dungeon so that Kerstin could get medical care.  It was then that the whole shocking story unfolded.

A 60 Minutes Australia story about Josef Fritzl.

Imagine, for a minute, being kept in a dungeon underground for twenty-four years, not seeing the light of day or breathing fresh air.  Then imagine being born in that dungeon and never seeing the sun or the moon or rain.  That was the reality of what happened to Elisabeth Fritzl and the children who were kept in the dungeon with her.  The youngest child was five when they were finally let out and being outside was like being in outer space.  Elisabeth’s children had only seen the outside world on television.  Kerstin, the nineteen year old daughter whose illness prompted their release, was kept in a medically induced coma for weeks after they were let out of the cell.  She very nearly died never having known the pleasure of feeling sunlight on her face. 

Secrets in the Cellar is well-written and interesting, though I did notice a few passages that became a bit repetitive.  Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that Glatt didn’t actually interview many of the people involved in this case.  That’s not entirely his fault, since the Fritzl family was very heavily guarded and protected from journalists.  On the other hand, what he’s written here most people could probably find out by reading news articles about the Fritzl case.  The book just makes the story more conveniently packaged.  Nevertheless, I am not sorry I read Secrets in the Cellar and I would recommend it to those who want to read about the Fritzl case.  I’d probably give it three stars out of five.

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book reviews, LDS, true crime

Repost: my review of The Sins of Brother Curtis…

Here’s a repost of a book review I wrote of The Sins of Brother Curtis, the sordid story of a Mormon convert who molested a number of young boys.  It was not a comfortable read for me, but it was a well-written and fascinating book.  I gave it five stars. I originally wrote this piece for Epinions.com in 2011. I am reposting it as/is.

Because my husband is a former member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), I have done a lot of reading about Mormonism.  I also have an interest in true crime.  Some weeks ago, someone on the Recovery from Mormonism Web site posted about a book called The Sins of Brother Curtis: A Story of Betrayal, Conviction, and the Mormon Church (2011).  The poster made the book sound compelling, so off I went to Amazon.com to download it for my Kindle.

The premise

Written by Lisa Davis, a veteran journalist who once wrote for Village Voice Media, The Sins of Brother Curtis is about a man named Franklyn Curtis and the many young boys he molested while a member of the LDS church.  In 1991, Curtis molested a 12 year old boy named Jeremiah Scott.  In 1997, Scott sued the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, alleging that the church knew of Curtis’s penchant for child molestation and did nothing to protect him or other boys in the church from Curtis.  Moreover, Curtis had a long rap sheet acquired before he had become a Mormon and got involved with various church callings that allowed him to charm families and ingratiate his way into sexual relationships with boys. 

Scott’s Seattle based lawyers, Tim Kosnoff and Joel Salmi, had a hell of a job on their hands.  The church’s lawyers fought back vehemently against the allegations against the LDS church’s involvement in Curtis’s crimes.  Scott’s lawyers tracked down over twenty different men who, as children, were victimized by Frank Curtis, who held church callings that put him into contact with boys, even though he had been excommunicated three times, twice for infractions that were related to his penchant for molesting children.  Curtis’s crimes against children stretched back decades and across several state lines. 

In her well-written expose, Davis unravels the complex story of a man whose perversions ruined lives and the church that apparently covered it up.  She also explains in detail the convoluted and challenging process Scott’s lawyers navigated to try to get justice for their client.  Franklyn Curtis was not involved in the civil suit or prosecuted for his crimes because he died in 1995 at the age of 92.

My thoughts

It took awhile to get through this book.  That’s not because it wasn’t interesting; it’s more because the subject matter is very disturbing.  Davis writes in an engaging style that is easy to read and follow, but she includes information that is frankly pretty nauseating.  I don’t fault her for including the information, but will warn to squeamish types that the sins of Brother Curtis may make their skin crawl.

Davis includes photos, pictures of legal documents, and even a picture of a blank disciplinary form used to document church members’ infractions of church rules and disciplinary actions taken.  The LDS church was forced to reveal its records of disciplinary actions taken against Frank Curtis, though it fought hard to keep those records confidential.

Davis reveals that the lawyers involved in this landmark case were somewhat disappointed in the outcome, even though it led to a sizeable financial settlement for their client, Jeremiah Scott.  The lawyers were eventually approached by other victims who had suffered in silence and they have gone on to bring suits against the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Catholic church, Boy Scouts of America, and the Salvation Army.  There have also been other attempts to sue the LDS church for covering up sexual abuse toward minors.  I couldn’t help but feel a bit unnerved and skeeved out reading about how so many young people are abused by adults involved in religious organizations.  The young people no doubt trusted these people because they were members of their church.

I suspect that this book will be very uncomfortable reading for devout members of the LDS church.  Some might feel defensive as they read about this case.  Indeed, Lisa Davis once worked with the late Deborah Laake, a former member of the LDS church and a vocal opponent of it.  Laake wrote a book called SecretCeremonies, which was published in the 1990s.  It was a scathing account of her time in the church and was widely criticized by outraged Mormons.  However, I have read that book with my husband and he has verified that it’s not full of lies.  In her acknowlegements in The Sins of Brother Curtis, Davis thanks Deborah Laake for her bravery and for leading her to write her own book.  Lisa Davis is not now and has never been Mormon, so I imagine some readers will claim that her viewpoint is skewed.  I found her reporting fair and thorough, though it definitely does not cast the church in a flattering light.

Overall   

While The Sins of Brother Curtis is ultimately a book about unspeakable crimes commited by an elderly pervert that will be unpleasant reading for many people, I think it’s an important book.  I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in reading about true crime, especially those involving religious organizations.  I would also recommend it to anyone researching legal cases involving religious organizations and sexual abuse.

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book reviews

Repost: A review of Tracey Gold’s Room To Grow: An Appetite for Life…

Here’s a repost of Tracey Gold’s book about her experiences with anorexia nervosa. I wrote this on September 27, 2016, and am reposting it as/is.

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, which were prime years for television sitcoms.  I watched a lot of TV when I was coming of age.  One show I rarely missed was Growing Pains, a family comedy starring Alan Thicke, Joanna Kerns, Kirk Cameron, Tracey Gold, and Jeremy Miller.  A few years into the show’s run (too late to save it), Ashley Johnson and a young Leonardo DiCaprio would also join the cast.

Since I watched a lot of TV as a kid, I also saw Tracey Gold in plenty of other shows.  She was a guest star on Trapper John, MD, starred in several After School Specials, and was also on CHiPs.  It was Gold’s appearance on CHiPs that finally prompted me to read her 2004 book, Room To Grow: An Appetite for Life.  I probably wanted to read this book when it first came out, but was scared away by all the negative reviews.  Now that I’ve read the book, I can say that although it’s now a bit dated, it’s probably not as bad as the many bad reviews would have you believe.  

Tracey Gold and her younger sister, Missy, were both child actors with some acclaim.  Missy Gold was the star of Benson, a show I never watched.  Benson aired for several years and, for awhile, Missy was probably more popular than Tracey was.  Both Tracey and Missy were products of their mother Bonnie’s first marriage to Joe Fisher.  When Bonnie and Joe split up, Joe was no longer in the picture.  Later, Bonnie remarried actor and agent Harry Gold (shortened from Goldstein).  He adopted Tracey and Missy and he and Bonnie had two more daughters naturally and adopted a third.

Apparently, the Golds were a very close and loving family, but had no boundaries.  Tracey explains that even if she had not been a child actress, she probably would have developed anorexia nervosa, which she had suffered from in two bouts.  The first one occurred when she was a pre-teen (and indeed, I remember reading about it when I was in the eighth grade).  The second happened in the late 1980s and early 90s, when Tracey was a young woman at the height of her career.  

Although she claims she did not become anorexic due to the many fat jokes hurled at her on Growing Pains, the jokes clearly did not help matters.  But, I suspect based on what I know about eating disorders and what Tracey herself reports, part of her problems with eating stemmed from having a mother who had bulimic tendencies.  And though she apparently loves Harry Gold as if he were her natural father, I suspect her biological father’s departure from her life also helped form the conditions that led to anorexia nervosa.  But that’s just my opinion and I could be wrong.

Room to Grow is a memoir that is mostly about Gold’s struggles with eating disorders.  Those who want to read about Tracey’s childhood growing up on television may be somewhat disappointed with this book.  She is interested mostly in explaining how the eating disorder developed as well as her relationship with her husband, Roby Marshall.  Since the book was published twelve years ago, it doesn’t cover the births of her youngest two sons, Aidan and Dylan.  It does discuss her pregnancies with older sons, Sage and Bailey.

This book is also basically well written, but does have a few editing glitches within it.  They are basically minor mistakes.  Ghostwriter Julie McCarron does a pretty good job of making this book sound as if it was coming straight from Tracey Gold.  I could pretty much picture Tracey saying aloud what was written on the pages.  There are photos included, but they are hard to see on a Kindle app.  

Room to Grow is not a bad book, though I think I would have found it more compelling had Tracey included more details about everything.  By this, I don’t just mean the eating disorder (which I’m pretty sure she deliberately tries to keep vague to prevent “thinsperation”), but everything…  I would have enjoyed reading a little more about her career and her family.  She offers a few teases, but doesn’t generally follow through.  So by the time I was finished reading, I didn’t feel like I got the whole story.  She’s had a very interesting career and comes from an interesting family.  More details would have been very beneficial to the end product.  Hell, I’d be interested if she’d just offered a few more details about her well known anorexia TV movie, For The Love of Nancy.  She had originally said she didn’t want to do this movie, but as you can see, she changed her mind… 

But overall… I think I’d give this book 3.5 stars.

Tracey Gold’s 1994 made for TV film about anorexia nervosa, For The Love of Nancy.

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book reviews

Repost: My review of Crash Into Me by Liz Seccuro

I am reposting this book review from December 7, 2014, because today’s fresh post mentions Brock Turner and the book is about a woman who was raped at a fraternity party. The review is posted as/is, so keep that in mind as I mention current events as of 2014.

If you’ve been reading the news lately, you may have seen an article that was recently published by Rolling Stone (the article has been taken down as of 2020) about a young woman named “Jackie” who claims that she was gang raped at a fraternity party at the University of Virginia.  I read the article when it was hot off the presses, alerted to it by a friend of mine who is a college professor in Virginia.  Later, the media indicated that Jackie’s story might not have been entirely truthful.  There were discrepancies in her story and it was clear that the reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, had not done all of her homework.  She never attempted to get the other side of the story and, instead, just ran with her big, sensational piece that led to fraternity activities at the University of Virginia being temporarily suspended.

While it’s disappointing when scandalous news is reported that turns out to be not quite true, the huge backlash from the original story did get people talking about rapes on college campuses.  That’s how I came to discover Liz Seccuro’s book, Crash Into Me. 

On October 5, 1984, Liz Seccuro, then known as Liz Schimpf, was a first year student at the University of Virginia.  She was very proud to be at UVA, since she was the first person in her family to get to go to college.  With ambitions of becoming a writer, Liz planned to major in English.  At just 17 years old, she was still a minor, but fitting into campus life and making friends.

That October night, Liz’s friend, Jim, asked her to accompany him to a party at a fraternity house.  Jim hoped to rush the fraternity and felt it would look better if he had a girl on his arm, even though he and Liz were strictly friends.  Liz didn’t want to go to the party, but Jim made a strong appeal and she finally consented to go.  While they were at the party, Jim went outside to smoke some marijuana with some of the brothers.  Liz ended up talking to a large stranger who seemed to be hitting on her.

She was drinking her second beer when a brother handed her a very tart glass of spiked punch.  The punch apparently had some type of drug in it that incapacitated Liz, who was soon hustled into the stranger’s bedroom.  The large man started pawing at her, reading her poetry, and finally, getting very physical.  Liz tried to escape, but her purse was locked away in a room.  As she screamed and banged on the locked door trying to get attention, her attacker and another man subdued her and dragged her back into the bedroom, where she was brutally raped.  As it turned out, she was raped not just by the first guy, but by at least two others.

When she regained consciousness hours later, Liz was wrapped in a bloody sheet.  Her attacker invited her to take one of his jackets since it was “chilly” outside.  Then he said he hoped he’d been “a gentleman”. 

Liz tried to get help for herself.  She first went to UVA’s hospital, where she was told she’d need “tests” that they didn’t offer there.  The nurse said she’d have to go to Richmond or Washington, DC to be properly examined.  Later, she went to student health, where she was examined by a nurse.  She spoke to deans, who seemed intent on sweeping the issue under the rug and handling it internally.  Liz was told that UVA preferred to “take care of their own”.  She was also told that the Charlottesville Police Department did not have jurisdiction over the fraternity house, so they would have to deal with University Police.  As it turned out, that was a blatant lie.

Liz stayed in school, while her attacker, who claimed that their sexual encounter had been “consensual”, withdrew from UVA.  Liz joined a sorority, made friends, dated a bit, and eventually graduated.  By September 2005, she was happily married to her second husband and enjoying their young daughter, Ava, and her thriving event planning business, when she got a strange letter in the mail.  It was from her attacker, William Beebe, an alcoholic living in Las Vegas who was trying to work his Alcoholics Anonymous steps by making amends to those he had harmed.  He was apparently tormented by guilt stemming from the attack and was reaching out to his victim, trying to right his wrongs toward her.

The initial letter came as Liz and her family were about to go on a working vacation.  It devastated Liz, who then began an email exchange with William Beebe.  Eventually, as there is no statute of limitations against rape in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Seccuro decided to press charges against Beebe.  Crash Into Me is her riveting, horrifying, yet beautifully written account of her experiences. 

I must admit that I was partly interested in Seccuro’s story because I am from Virginia and attended a college not too far from UVA.  Growing up, UVA was everybody’s dream school.  It’s an excellent public university where the parties are as legendary as its scholarship.  Greek life at UVA, as it was at my own alma mater, is very popular.  So is heavy drinking.  Though I don’t remember any stories about sexual assault at my college, I’m certain they existed.  Perhaps they were even covered up, the same way they were at UVA when Liz Seccuro was a student.  I think it’s shameful that this happened to Liz Seccuro or anyone else, but it’s even more shameful that UVA apparently tried to sweep it under the rug rather than help victims seek justice.

When I was a freshman at what was at that time Longwood College, there was a big story about date rape in the news.  It involved Katie Koestner, who was a freshman at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.  At the time, a former friend was attending William & Mary, so I heard all about the local uproar about Katie Koestner from her, especially when she appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine.  Later, Koestner spoke at the University of South Carolina, where I was in graduate school. Koestner’s story was somewhat different than Seccuro’s in that she and her attacker had been out on a date.  In Seccuro’s case, the attacker(s) were total strangers.     

I think Liz Seccuro’s story is very important, especially to high school and college aged women.  While rape is never the victim’s fault, Seccuro’s story does offer a cautionary tale to women about staying safe at social events and being careful about drinking alcohol and being separated from a crowd.  Women shouldn’t have to be so vigilant about their own personal safety, but unfortunately, there are a lot of creeps out there.  And apparently, rape is a big problem at UVA and elsewhere.  Even cultural icons like Bill Cosby, who made a career out of being “fatherly” and is the last person most would think capable of rape, is under fire for allegedly drugging and raping women.

I highly recommend Liz Seccuro’s book, Crash Into Me.   

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