Despite its flaws, hard to put down, and harder to forget.
A jolting, unusual memoir from the ultimate fish out of water: a middle-aged MBA who pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter.
Brooklyn-born Lerner, a former Pacific Bell executive who comes off as a wittier version of every cellular-equipped guy in a Lexus, saw his world destroyed after he inadvertently strangled an unhinged, violent acquaintance following a booze-and-gambling binge. Charged with murder, he accepted a two-to-twelve-year sentence in 1998. Overwhelmed by the Dickensian sadism and Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the Nevada prison system, he used his immersion in corporate self-help maxims (a gag that grows tiresome) to adapt to this new environment of hostile takeovers. While Lerner is threatened with sodomy, mocked for his genteel background, and occasionally pursued by roughnecks like Big Hunger (“This banana be mines!”), little physical harm befalls him: his cellmate and friend Kansas is a “shotcaller” among the Nazi prisoners (Lerner neglected to mention his Semitic roots); the other inmates laugh at his “side-talking” witticisms and appreciate his help with sentencing figures, personal-ad writing, and legal jargon. Even Kansas’s white-power acolytes seem a jolly bunch, once Lerner assigns them the Seven Dwarfs’ nicknames. The unrelenting viciousness of many of the jail’s COs, however, runs as a disquieting undercurrent about the realities of imprisonment in post–Drug War, “Tough On Crime” America. The final quarter here is weakest, as Lerner melodramatically depicts the yearlong struggle with divorce, corporate bloodletting, alcoholism, and recovery that culminated in the Las Vegas incident. Whatever the author’s personal failings, his depiction of contemporary prison life (he remains incarcerated, following a parole approval that was later denied) is invaluable: humorous, crisply detailed, and sometimes heartbreaking, as when his attuned suburban eye captures the desolate loneliness of once-youthful gangsters 20 years into their life-without-parole sentences. Ironically, Lerner’s white-collar Everyman perspective may force readers to truly see the cruel inequities of our current system.
Despite its flaws, hard to put down, and harder to forget.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-0918-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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