An unvarnished look at a life reclaimed deep within the edifice of mass incarceration.
A raw, contemplative account of a death-row inmate’s journey toward redemption through faith, family, and rap.
This unusual memoir, a collaboration between Braxton and Katz, who teaches a course on “Music and Incarceration” at the University of North Carolina, captures wisdom accrued through more than 25 years of incarceration. Braxton contacted Katz in 2019, seeking guidance on how to better record the raps he had been writing. Katz notes that Braxton “accepts his guilt” for three murders he committed as a young man, acknowledging, “I do not want to minimize his crimes or ignore his victims.” He asserts that the detail and originality of Braxton’s writing (many lyrics appear in the book) speak to the potential for personal growth and cultural value despite these crimes, and he casts himself as part of “a self-fashioned ‘Alim team,’ working to share Braxton’s powerful words and music.” Braxton identifies himself as “a prisoner, a writer, and a rapper on North Carolina’s Death Row,” aspiring to both dramatize his rejection of the nihilistic violence of “street” machismo (“I was nineteen years old and fascinated with the idea of being a gangster”) and call attention to the ugly reality of wrongfully convicted individuals sentenced to death. “Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen 35 people executed and 7 people exonerated because they were innocent,” he wrote in one of his letters. In percussive, short chapters, Braxton vividly presents his own background, including documentation of bleak decades behind bars and feelings of guilt and torment, which dedication to Islam helped him address. “There’s no getting around the darkness in this book,” writes Katz, but there is also “joy, hope, and love.” Though the narrative structure is sometimes too disjointed, Braxton’s story is worth discussing.
An unvarnished look at a life reclaimed deep within the edifice of mass incarceration.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781469678702
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
