by Robert Ellis Gordon & Inmates of the Washington State Corrections System ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2000
Not a tremendously hopeful work, but Gordon's audaciousness in regarding the condemned as creative citizens is memorable and...
A surprising—and frequently searing—examination of the prison experience, seen from both inside and out.
Novelist Gordon (When Bobby Kennedy Was a Moving Man, 1993) ran intensive writing workshops in Washington State prisons for nine years, until funding was ignominiously truncated. He initially explores the contemporary explosion in incarceration, noting that imprisonment rates have doubled in the last decade, even while the American people are "in no hurry to lay claim to the prisoners in our midst." As implied by his title, he views this reluctance to consider the realities of the imprisonment surge as akin to willful blindness in the face of a ghastly, distorted civic reflection. In contrast, his enthusiasm for his prison teaching experience is palpable: he offers strong tales of prisoners who found release and grace in writing, and discovered the joys of its inherent craftsmanship. Gordon maintains a wry, informed stance that strengthens his arguments regarding prisoner humanity and the pure (and vicious) moral relativism that prisons breed—particularly in the "get-tough" era, when even education and the simplest privileges are stripped away. Additionally, he culls a variety of memorable pieces in distinctive voices from the current and former prisoners he's taught. Yet their writing surges with edgy awareness and hard-won insights: memorable essays range from an attempted murderer's chillingly humorous tips on prison survival ("Commit an Honorable Crime . . . Keep a Good Porn Collection") to a twice-convicted rapist—now held indefinitely according to new Orwellian notions of civil commitment—recounting the violence and contempt accorded sex offenders (who stand lowest on the convict pecking order, along with snitches). Gordon's finely honed stance is most haunting: he draws difficult conclusions regarding the humanity of his charges, he portrays their absurdist moments of honesty or altruism, and he testifies convincingly about the power of writing to foster discipline and engagement with the world—perhaps to stifle criminal nihilism.
Not a tremendously hopeful work, but Gordon's audaciousness in regarding the condemned as creative citizens is memorable and gripping.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-87422-198-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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