Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case (Melville House Classic Journalism)

"The most important book by perhaps the most important newspaper editor of the last half century."-Gay Talese

"Abe Rosenthal told a stunning, tragic story and called each one of us to account for averting our eyes-and hearts-and voices."-Mike Wallace

"A memorable book that needs to be available to anyone who struggles to live an honorable life."-Robert Coles

It's one of the most oft-cited murders in US history: Thirty-eight people in Queens, New York, watched from their windows as twenty-eight-year-old Kitty Genovese was chased by a madman with a knife up and down their respectable, middle-class street, screaming for help while she was attacked, again and again, until she was dead. The murder took over half an hour. Not one of the thirty-eight witnesses did a thing to help her.

Legendary newsman Abe Rosenthal was metro editor of TheNew York Times then, and the murder occurred on his beat.

Thirty years after its first publication, his Thirty-Eight Witnesses remains the only book on the subject, as well as the only book ever written by the great journalist. It is part memoir, part investigative journalism, and part public service.

A.M. Rosenthal was, for many years, the executive editor of The New York Times, deciding to run the Pentagon Papers, among other notable stories. Before that, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his journalism. He died in 2005.

Thirty-five years after its first printing, Thirty-Eight Witnesses remains a starkly terrifying morality play, shocking the reader with the now-infamous tale of Catherine ("Kitty") Genovese, murdered on her Queens, New York, doorstep in full view of acquaintances, neighbors, and friends--all of whom did nothing, even though the woman was stabbed repeatedly and stalked by her killer for more than an hour. The book's republication adds a haunted echo to its story, reminding the reader that things have changed since 1964, and not at all for the better. The furor and anger toward the silent witnesses after Genovese's death, as Rosenthal documents it, seems almost quaint by today's standards. But if society has lost its ability to feel horror and shame, perhaps it's time to let someone like Rosenthal speak calmly and quietly to our potential to reignite the outrage: "Every man must fear the witness in himself who whispers to close the window," he concludes. The prose of Thirty-Eight Witnesses--a slim, concise volume that includes only the scarcest hint of extraneous detail about Genovese's life--is calm and steady, with a thoroughness and lack of emotion belying the anger Rosenthal must have felt while he was typing, the shuddering fear of what the world had become... and possibly the nagging suspicion that it had always been this way. --Tjames Madison