On the afternoon of February 24th, 1965, Amylu Danzer, a
twenty-year-old art student who’d been visiting Jones Beach on Long
Island, went missing. A month later, her body was swept ashore some
sixteen miles away, at Far Rockaway.
In this tender, courageous, and compellingly written memoir, the
writer and photographer John Rosenthal looks back on his youthful
friendship with Amylu, and, drawing on multiple sources—amongst them his
own journals, the testimony of her family and some
of the people with whom she studied, newspaper reports of her death,
and the eyewitness account of one of the men who found her body—he seeks
to answer some of the questions which have haunted him ever since he
first learned of her death—questions which were
either too easily dismissed or else were too easily answered at the
time.
Searching for Amylu Danzer is a powerful and unillusioned
book, and in writing it Rosenthal has ensured that however short her
life was, Amylu Danzer will not be counted as one of those which have no
memorial … and are become as though they have
never been born.