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	A Story of Betrayal, Conviction, and the Mormon Church By Lisa Davis New York Times August 15, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/books/review/nonfiction-chronicle.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=kosnoff&st=cse The Mormon Church provides a chance for sinners to be forgiven and to seek absolution. Unfortunately, it also extends the privilege to pedophiles. Davis recounts how Frank Curtis, a church member (and Sunday-­school teacher) accused of molesting children, was excommunicated, after which he repented. Following his rebaptism he abused more children; over a decade and a half, at least 20 boys and girls in three different cities suffered. One 10-year-old wrote a note to his little sister and slipped it under his bedroom door: “Frank is raping me.” Church lawyers cited the First Amendment as they defended the practice of forgiving people like Curtis and allowing them to mingle with children. Davis, an investigative journalist who has written for SF Weekly, presents a David vs. Goliath case featuring an obsessive lawyer, Tim Kosnoff, who racks up debt and eventually wins a $3 million settlement. Yet the prose is leaden: “Play was instinctual,” she writes of a 1970s-era suburban neighborhood. “If there was a ball, it was tossed.” Later, she offers perfunctory descriptions of the church’s inner workings and recites tedious exchanges. (In one deposition, we learn, a lawyer asked a former private investigator, “And then you typed the word ‘stated’?”) The book duly chronicles abuses within the church and the legal fallout, but it fails to convey the horror.
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