What Lisa Knew

Description for WHAT LISA KNEW: THE TRUTHS AND LIES OF THE STEINBERG CASE by Joyce Johnson: SHE WAS FOUND IN DARKNESS---THE BRUISED, COMATOSE FIRST-GRADER WHO WOULD NEVER WAKE UP TO TELL ANYONE WHICH OF THE TWO ADULTS IN THE SMALL, FILTHY GREENWICH VILLAGE APARTMENT HAD BEATEN HER. Although on January 30, 1989, Joel Steinberg was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter after a twelve-week, nationally televised trial in which his former lover, Hedda Nussbaum, was the star prosecution witness, the story of what really happened to Lisa Steinberg remains as mysterious and inconclusive as Henry James's THE TURN OF THE SCREW, which is also about children at the mercy of evil surrogate parents who use them in their games with each other. "The truth will set you free," Nussbaum wrote Steinberg shortly after Lisa's death. But "why should either of them---collaborators in the destruction of a child---have been set free?" Joyce Johnson asks, as she questions the moral validity of wha