A heart-wrenching yet ultimately hopeful story about truth, justice, and the need for criminal justice reform.
An urgent, emotional memoir from one of the longest-serving condemned death row inmates to be found innocent in America.
One night in July 1985, Hinton was locked in a secure warehouse of a supermarket for his overnight shift when, 15 miles away, the assistant manager of a local restaurant was kidnapped at gunpoint, robbed, and shot in the head. Less than a week later, police showed up at Hinton’s house to arrest him for that crime and the murders of two other local Alabama restaurant managers. Hinton was black, 29, living at home with his mother, and innocent of all charges. At his trial, his lawyer presented an incompetent defense that failed to refute the state’s distorted evidence and several witnesses’ false claims. Hinton was found guilty of two counts of capital murder and sentenced to death by electric chair. For the next three decades, he maintained his innocence in solitary confinement on Alabama’s death row, where he watched more than 50 men led past his cell to the execution chamber just 30 feet away. The truth of Hinton’s innocence and his unshakable faith in God helped him cope with prison life and several failed repeal attempts until Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, eventually took up his case and brought it all the way to the Supreme Court. After nearly 30 years, all charges against Hinton were dropped, and he was released from prison in 2015. Woven into vivid descriptions of life behind bars are flashbacks to the author’s childhood, court transcripts, police documents, news clippings, and correspondence that reveal the roles racism, poverty, and fear played in creating a deeply biased criminal justice system that punishes the poor and people of color. Stevenson (Just Mercy, 2014) provides a powerful foreword.
A heart-wrenching yet ultimately hopeful story about truth, justice, and the need for criminal justice reform.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12471-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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
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
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