Will appeal to fans of legal thrillers and stories of redemption.
With the assistance of Burke (co-author: The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur, 2008), Hopwood delivers an unusual tale of punishment and redemption.
The author is frank and regretful about his youthful decision to rob five banks in the vast area around his small Nebraska hometown. When his crime spree unraveled, he wisely took a plea offer, resulting in a 12-year federal prison sentence. Without diminishing his own culpability, Hopwood writes affectingly of the prison experience: “It is beyond strange to be in such a place and feel your life freezing over, like a sci-fi story where you lie down in your rocket, not to return until everyone you know is old.” Although he was nervous about the intricate social behaviors required to survive in prison, he was luckily transferred from the kitchen to the prison legal library, where he discovered an aptitude for decoding court decisions. He also realized that helping his fellow prisoners with their appeals gave him a sense of moral balance. Improbably, one such filing, concerning a dubiously obtained confession, went all the way to the Supreme Court, and Hopwood worked with high-powered attorney Seth Waxman to prepare the ultimately successful argument. He also found time to strike up a long-distance romance with a beautiful but troubled girl from home. The author’s success helped him stay straight after his release, when he found employment at a printer of Supreme Court briefs. The prose is clear and thoughtful, vividly illustrating the grim absurdity of life in prison, and most readers will root for Hopwood’s attempts to follow a different path. However, some readers will tire of the author’s proselytizing tone with respect to his rediscovered Christian faith.
Will appeal to fans of legal thrillers and stories of redemption.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-88783-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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