The Victim's Song

The unremitting horror of the consequences of violent crime has never been depicted with such relentless honesty and anger as in The Victim's Song.

Eric Kaminsky, a twenty-two-year-old music student was robbed, stabbed in the back, and then thrown on the tracks of a New York City subway, where he died. In this book, Professor Alice R. Kaminsky, Eric's mother, gives a powerful account of this senseless tragedy. She describes the continuing pain she suffers from the loss of her only child and exposes the inadequacies of our flawed criminal justice system in her discussion of the trial of his murderers.

This is a shocking book because the author expresses her anger honestly and without offering any of the palliatives of the bereavement books. No one who reads The Victim's Song will ever forget the torment experienced by the victims of crime in our increasingly violent society. Nor will anyone who reads The Victim's Song ever forget Eric Kaminsky.

Kaminsky's son, Eric, a 22-year-old music student, was murdered during a robbery in the New York City subway. The author, a professor of English, wishes "to inundate the reader with anger," and the first half of the book is an authentic expression of the grief and rage felt by the victims of murder. In the remainder, Kaminsky vents her wrath against the criminal justice system, defense attorneys, death-penalty opponents, New York City and its subway, and Norman Mailer. Marked by uneven and didactic writing, this book is essentially an idiosyncratic outpouring of emotion. Not a necessary purchase. Gregor A. Preston, Univ. of California Lib., Davis
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.