Nice jailhouse work by a bright public servant.
A former yeshiva student depicts the goings-on inside a Boston prison.
Adrift after graduating from Harvard, Steinberg realized that his job as a freelance obituary writer was not satisfying enough. He considered grad school but realized that “I wasn’t going to be of any use to a university, and vice versa. And so the choice crystallized in my mind: It was either law school or prison. The decision was clear.” So the author took a job as a prison librarian. This memoir has more literary power than the usual similar fare—sweeter than Jeffrey Archer’s complaints, more lucid than Tommy Chong’s ruminations. With notes on penology and prison architecture, Steinberg describes the manifold workings of a Big House library. The aesthetics of his patrons ran to contemporary matter (“The true crime genre was…a favorite”), rather than Shakespeare and other classics. His library was a legal research center, a clearing house for written messages, a meeting place and a haven of solitude. During his time there, the author taught creative writing to student inmates and, inevitably, learned much from the many different types of criminals he encountered. He provides vivid character sketches of Nasty, C.C. Too Sweet, JizzB, Dumayne and others. Of course, the names “and personal characteristics” are changed to protect the innocent writer, but most important are the loyalties and allegiances behind bars and the writer’s complicated relationships with his patrons. Throughout, Steinberg muses over ethical dilemmas with rabbinical indecisiveness, and his text, burdened with complex implications, is founded on simple kindliness.
Nice jailhouse work by a bright public servant.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-52909-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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