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 22, 2019
Did you like this book?
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
