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UBC: Stout
Mar. 6th, 2014 01:33 pmStout, David. The Boy in the Box: The Unsolved Case of America's Unknown Child. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press-The Globe Pequot Press, 2008.
The Boy in the Box (later pretentiously renamed America's Unknown Child) was a child, somewhere between four and six years old, found in a cardboard box in Philadelphia in February 1957. He had been beaten to death. Despite what seemed like any number of promising clues, including surgical scars, he has, to this day, not been positively identified, and at this point, every passing day makes it more likely that the person or persons who could have identified him are dead themselves.
(I have had this sentence running through my head for a couple days now: If the living don't remember the dead, who will? It seems to be some sort of morbid koan, since it is the most utterly rhetorical of rhetorical questions and yet won't leave me alone.)
This is the book Somebody's Daughter wanted to be. Stout is telling the story of the Boy in the Box and of the investigators who kept searching for answers for fifty years, and he's also telling the story of how, over those same fifty years, cases like Bobby Greenlease, Steven Damman, Adam Walsh, Mary Beth Tinning, Stephen Van Der Sluys, Waneta Hoyt, Marie Noe, Little Miss 1565, Jerell Willis (the Boy in the Bag), Angelica Evergreen, and Riley Ann Sawyers (Baby Grace), were changing societal awareness of the vulnerability of small children--particularly their vulnerability at the hands of their caregivers. And, of course, the terrible threnody of the children who are lost and never found, like Steven Damman, and the children who are found and never identified, like the Boy in the Box.
There is a vein of sentimentality in Stout, toward both the Boy in the Box and toward the investigators, and while it's understandable, I find it cloying and distracting. But, obviously, this is a fast and gripping read (I started it over dinner last night and finished it before I went to bed), and Stout does an excellent job of telling the story of an unsuccessful investigation and all the competing narratives it spawns.
This is a sad book in many ways--none of these children can be saved, and the investigators' persistence (and sometimes obsession) is not rewarded. But it is also a hopeful book, because for every Mary Beth Tinning and Stephen Van Der Sluys, there is someone who is trying to make things better, to find answers, to bring Waneta Hoyt and Marie Noe to justice. And ultimately, this is the story of people (including Stout himself) who are insisting on REMEMBERING the Boy in the Box, who care even though they have no reason to. It's this quixotic streak that balances the terrible savagery in human nature, and Stout does a remarkably good job of encompassing both.
The Boy in the Box (later pretentiously renamed America's Unknown Child) was a child, somewhere between four and six years old, found in a cardboard box in Philadelphia in February 1957. He had been beaten to death. Despite what seemed like any number of promising clues, including surgical scars, he has, to this day, not been positively identified, and at this point, every passing day makes it more likely that the person or persons who could have identified him are dead themselves.
(I have had this sentence running through my head for a couple days now: If the living don't remember the dead, who will? It seems to be some sort of morbid koan, since it is the most utterly rhetorical of rhetorical questions and yet won't leave me alone.)
This is the book Somebody's Daughter wanted to be. Stout is telling the story of the Boy in the Box and of the investigators who kept searching for answers for fifty years, and he's also telling the story of how, over those same fifty years, cases like Bobby Greenlease, Steven Damman, Adam Walsh, Mary Beth Tinning, Stephen Van Der Sluys, Waneta Hoyt, Marie Noe, Little Miss 1565, Jerell Willis (the Boy in the Bag), Angelica Evergreen, and Riley Ann Sawyers (Baby Grace), were changing societal awareness of the vulnerability of small children--particularly their vulnerability at the hands of their caregivers. And, of course, the terrible threnody of the children who are lost and never found, like Steven Damman, and the children who are found and never identified, like the Boy in the Box.
There is a vein of sentimentality in Stout, toward both the Boy in the Box and toward the investigators, and while it's understandable, I find it cloying and distracting. But, obviously, this is a fast and gripping read (I started it over dinner last night and finished it before I went to bed), and Stout does an excellent job of telling the story of an unsuccessful investigation and all the competing narratives it spawns.
This is a sad book in many ways--none of these children can be saved, and the investigators' persistence (and sometimes obsession) is not rewarded. But it is also a hopeful book, because for every Mary Beth Tinning and Stephen Van Der Sluys, there is someone who is trying to make things better, to find answers, to bring Waneta Hoyt and Marie Noe to justice. And ultimately, this is the story of people (including Stout himself) who are insisting on REMEMBERING the Boy in the Box, who care even though they have no reason to. It's this quixotic streak that balances the terrible savagery in human nature, and Stout does a remarkably good job of encompassing both.
