- Mass Market Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Pocket Books; illustrated edition edition (6 July 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0671017470
- ISBN-13: 978-0671017477
- Product Dimensions: 17.2 x 10.6 x 3.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 454,962 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
JOURNEY TO THE KILLING GROUND
It was an age of innocence -- an era of carhops, poodle skirts, and hula hoops. It was also a time of terror. In 1958, a man named Harvey Glatman sped along the Santa Ana freeway out of L.A., headed to the desert with his "date" huddled in the passenger seat beside him. In his pockets Harvey had a gun and a length of rope. Drunk on power, arousal, and rage, Harvey also had a plan. And beneath the desert stars, by the light of the moon, he carried out his ordeal of unimaginable cruelty -- using his body, a camera, and his rope....
Months later, after one of his inhuman attacks went awry, Harvey's torture killings were described to a shocked and silent California courtroom. For decades, these infamous deeds would inspire television and movie plots. But until now, there has been no definitive account of the forces that drove one of America's most legendary serial killers. And never before has it been explained why, for Harvey Glatman, his crimes weren't about killing, raping, and torturing at all -- they were all about the rope.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
This book details the crimes of serial killer H. Glatman.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Rope: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Harvey Glatman (Mass Market Paperback)
The book seems repetitive three quarters of the way through and I was unable to complete the entire book. There are many other "better" true crime reads than this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
3.1 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews) 9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Overlong and tediously informative true crime account,
By David W. Nicholas - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Rope: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Harvey Glatman (Mass Market Paperback)
I've read a number of true crime books in the past. None of them has dealt with a character as strange as Harvey Glatman, a mousy little guy from New York who came to California to meet girls, and wound up tying them up and strangling them. It's a curious, strange story, and it'd be interesting if it weren't for Newton's obsession with getting every last fact before the reader.The book includes a summary of each of the killings. Glatman essentially kidnapped the women, tied them up, photographed them, raped them, then strangled them, abandoning the bodies in the desert to the south or east of L.A. He was caught when his fourth victim fought back, and managed to get his gun away from him, running away right into the arms of a Highway Patrol officer getting off work. All of the facts of the crimes as far as the author can discern them, Glatman's trial (he pled guilty and requested execution as soon as possible) and subsequent execution, and even the disposition of the victim's personal effects, are covered in detail. It's fascinating for the most part, if a bit much. The problem comes in the author's decision to go beyond that. He spends a chapter not only going over the killer's early life in New York, but briefly surveying the history of Jews in New York City (Glatman was Jewish and from N.Y.C.). The author seems obsessed with displaying a command of the study of serial killers which would no doubt be interesting in a survey of them. Unfortunately, given that the book is supposedly about Glatman, it's mostly distracting. To make things worse, the killings themselves are described in detail, mostly reconstructed from the interrogations the police did after Glatman was arrested. Several chapters later, the interrogations are repeated almost word for word, so that you go over the same material again. It's a bit much. Lastly, remember that I said Glatman took photographs? They were apparently destroyed after his conviction (some of them were nude) but a newspaper in Denver got some of the milder ones and published them, and Newton reprints them. They're nothing compared with modern pornography: women bound wearing clothes, with frightened expressions on their faces. The idea that the fear is real, though, is a bit unsettling, and some may be squeamish about this. All in all this is a solid true crime book, if a bit heavy on the detail and extraneous material. 6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
No Ted Bundy!,
By Jeff Bricker - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Rope: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Harvey Glatman (Mass Market Paperback)
Readers who like their serial killers to be charming, cunning monsters will be a little disappointed with Harvey Glatman. A nerdy TV repairman with a taste for bondage photography, Glatman was essentially a rapist who murdered his victims almost as an afterthought. Author Newman reports that Glatman regularly scored high on IQ tests, which puzzles this reader, since at no point in this narrative does the killer display an ounce of intelligence (at the time of his arrest two of his victim's bodies hadn't even been found, so whiz-kid Harvey helpfully leads the police to the corpses). Newman is a skillful writer, but there's little of interest in the last 200 pages of this book.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Don't bother ...,
By cs "bookreader" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Rope: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Harvey Glatman (Mass Market Paperback)
I have read a lot of true crime, and I found this to be one of the duller, more forgettable offerings. First of all, the subject Harvey Glatman is not terribly interesting either as a personality or as a murderer. Second, the book was overly long for the volume of information contained; the second 1/3 - 1/2 is pretty much a rehash of the first part, with no new information coming forth. Best about the book: Glatman, as a true-crime genre subject, is a bit refreshing and even oddly likable insofar as he's not into sadism, and such murders as he committed were (to him) an unpleasant necessity for avoiding punishment in his misguided search for pretty much straight sex.
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