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Smart details kidnapping in memoir

SALT LAKE CITY

Minutes after 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was snatched from her bedroom in the dead of night, a police cruiser idled by along a neighborhood street as she was forced to the ground at knifepoint. “Move and I will kill you!” her captor hissed.

It was one of several fleeting times Smart watched a rescue slip away during her nine-month ordeal, she recounts in “My Story,” a 308-page book released by St. Martin’s Press on Monday.

She writes that she was so terrified of the street preacher who kidnapped her that when she was rescued by police in a Salt Lake City suburb in March 2003, she only reluctantly identified herself.

Between the heartbreak of missed chances, Smart writes, she was treated as a sex object by Brian David Mitchell and as a slave by his wife, Wanda Barzee. She says they denied her food and water for days at a time.

A U.S. attorney called it one of the kidnapping crimes of the century. Smart, a quiet, devout Mormon who played the harp and loved horses, vanished without a trace from her home high above Salt Lake City.

Smart, now 25, is married, living in Park City, finishing a music degree at Brigham Young University and traveling across the country giving speeches and doing advocacy work. She created the Elizabeth Smart Foundation to bring awareness to predatory crimes against children. For her, the book was another way to help bring nine months of brutality to a close.

“I want people to know that I’m happy in my life right now,” Smart told The Associated Press. “I also, even more so, want to reach out to people who might not be in a good situation.”

Literature Nobel to be announced Thursday

STOCKHOLM

The panel that selects the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature says it will announce its decision Thursday.

That means the dates of all the 2013 Nobel Prize announcements have been set.

The Swedish Academy receives hundreds of nominations from literary and language professors from around the world, as well as previous laureates and the heads of writers’ organizations.

The Nobel Prize in medicine was announced Monday and will be followed by the physics prize today and chemistry Wednesday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday, and the economics award is set for Oct. 14. Each prize is worth $1.2 million and will be presented Dec. 10.

Associated Press