A moving, inspirational story that makes a powerful argument for sentencing reform.
A freed federal prisoner recounts how she got in—and out.
Johnson was born in Mississippi, one of nine children who lived in a sharecropper’s shack: “No matter where I was situated,” she writes, “I couldn’t toss or turn. We fit snugly together and dared not move until the next day, when the sun’s rays came through the poorly insulated windows and warmed us.” Her parents aspired to better things, though, and having secretly built a home in a town 10 miles away—secretly to avoid angering the white farm owner in those last days of Jim Crow—they moved. Johnson was a motivated, smart student who got pregnant as a sophomore in high school; she kept up with her education all the same, eventually getting a job as a secretary. A too-good-to-be-true scenario unfolded when she was recruited to act as a relayer of messages between customers and a drug ring—and then was arrested in a major sting operation. “I didn’t know this at the time,” she writes, “but whenever someone is up on drug charges, cooperating witnesses frequently jump in on that case to reduce their own sentences.” Promoted from go-between to ringleader as a result of others’ testimony, Johnson was sentenced, under mandatory guidelines, to life in a federal penitentiary—first California, meaning that her family could not afford to visit, and later in Texas and Alabama. She made good use of her prison time, writing religious plays, being cheerfully helpful, and steering clear of trouble—all qualities that helped bring her case to the attention of Kim Kardashian, who in turn put her husband, Kanye West, on it, using his connections: “I know Kanye had opened the door for my release through his support of President Trump.” Freed last year after serving “twenty-one years, seven months and six days,” she has since become an advocate for prisoners’ rights, “fighting for those I left behind.”
A moving, inspirational story that makes a powerful argument for sentencing reform.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-293610-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2019
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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