A Death in Belmont

by SebastianJunger (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2006

  $3.49

  This is a compelling portrait of 1960s America that takes as its starting point the brutal events of 11 March 1963, the day on which the lives of three complete strangers - a black handyman, an Italian-American carpenter and a second-generation Jewish housewife - collided in the leafy Boston suburb of Belmont. These three people did not know one another, but, by the end of the day, the housewife had been raped and strangled, the handyman had been arrested on suspicion of being the notorious Boston Strangler, and the real Boston Strangler - carpenter Al DeSalvo - had returned home to his wife and children. It was not until two years later that DeSalvo admitted to the gruesomely violent murders of thirteen women. Also unwittingly drawn into the drama were one-year-old Sebastian Junger's own family, who posed for a photograph with DeSalvo the day after the Belmont strangling, at the completion of his work on their studio. Taking the chilling family snap as his inspiration, Junger explores the worlds of the three protagonists and, in so doing, creates a portrait of America in the 1960s that touches on the historic themes of the era: the assassination of JFK, the rise of the immigrants and the troubling race relations that prefigured the death of Martin Luther King. This new work by Sebastian Junger, the acclaimed author of Perfect Storm and Fire , is as enlightening as it is haunting. Taking as its foundation the events that shocked a quiet community in 1963, A Death in Belmont expands to encompass an entire nation at a time of extraordinary social turmoil.

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $3.49

  A compelling portrait of 1960s America that takes as its starting point the brutal events of 11 March 1963, the day on which the lives of three complete strangers -- a black handyman, an Italian-American carpenter and a second-generation Jewish housewife -- collided in the leafy Boston suburb of Belmont. These three people did not know one another, but, by the end of the day, the housewife had been raped and strangled, the handyman had been arrested on suspicion of being the notorious Boston Strangler, and the real Boston Strangler -- carpenter Al DeSalvo -- had returned home to his wife and children. It was not until two years later that DeSalvo admitted to the gruesomely violent murders of thirteen women. Also unwittingly drawn into the drama were one-year-old Sebastian Junger's own family, who posed for a photograph with DeSalvo the day after the Belmont strangling, at the completion of his work on their studio. Taking the chilling family snap as his inspiration, Junger explores the worlds of the three protagonists and, in so doing, creates a portrait of America in the 1960s that touches on the historic themes of the era: the assassination of JFK, the rise of the immigrants and the troubling race relations that prefigured the death of Martin Luther King. This new work by Sebastian Junger, the acclaimed author of 'Perfect Storm' and 'Fire', is as enlightening as it is haunting. Taking as its foundation the events that shocked a quiet community in 1963, 'A Death in Belmont' expands to encompass an entire nation at a time of extraordinary social turmoil.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2006

  $3.49

  In the spring of 1963, the quiet suburb of Belmont, Massachusetts, is rocked by a shocking sex murder that exactly fits the pattern of the Boston Strangler. Sensing a break in the case that has paralyzed the city of Boston, the police track down a black man, Roy Smith, who cleaned the victim's house that day and left a receipt with his name on the kitchen counter. Smith is hastily convicted of the Belmont murder, but the terror of the Strangler continues.
  
  On the day of the murder, Albert DeSalvo-the man who would eventually confess in lurid detail to the Strangler's crimes-is also in Belmont, working as a carpenter at the Jungers' home. In this spare, powerful narrative, Sebastian Junger chronicles three lives that collide-and ultimately are destroyed-in the vortex of one of the first and most controversial serial murder cases in America.

• New

  Paperback
  2007

  $13.29

  A compelling portrait of 1960s America that takes as its starting point the brutal events of 11 March 1963, the day on which the lives of three complete strangers -- a black handyman, an Italian-American carpenter and a second-generation Jewish housewife -- collided in the leafy Boston suburb of Belmont. These three people did not know one another, but, by the end of the day, the housewife had been raped and strangled, the handyman had been arrested on suspicion of being the notorious Boston Strangler, and the real Boston Strangler -- carpenter Al DeSalvo -- had returned home to his wife and children. It was not until two years later that DeSalvo admitted to the gruesomely violent murders of thirteen women. Also unwittingly drawn into the drama were one-year-old Sebastian Junger's own family, who posed for a photograph with DeSalvo the day after the Belmont strangling, at the completion of his work on their studio. Taking the chilling family snap as his inspiration, Junger explores the worlds of the three protagonists and, in so doing, creates a portrait of America in the 1960s that touches on the historic themes of the era: the assassination of JFK, the rise of the immigrants and the troubling race relations that prefigured the death of Martin Luther King. This new work by Sebastian Junger, the acclaimed author of 'Perfect Storm' and 'Fire', is as enlightening as it is haunting. Taking as its foundation the events that shocked a quiet community in 1963, 'A Death in Belmont' expands to encompass an entire nation at a time of extraordinary social turmoil.