A disappointing screed that ultimately adds little to the death-penalty debate.
Uneven collection of arguments against the death penalty.
A Life in the Balance (2001), also written with his wife Jodie, chronicled Sinclair’s brutal experiences as a prisoner in the Louisiana state penitentiary at Angola. He spent nearly six years there on death row before the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in 1972 on the grounds that it was inequitably applied. (States scrambled to come up with constitutionally acceptable death-penalty laws, and executions recommenced in 1977.) Resentenced to life without parole, Sinclair became a writer and jailhouse lawyer during his subsequent 40 years in the Louisiana prison system; he was released in 2006 and is now a paralegal in Houston. Primarily a bland, though admittedly thorough catalogue of statistics, this book is not the gripping anti–capital punishment blast one might expect from a survivor of death row. His main argument—that the death penalty is cruel and cannot be administered fairly under our legal system—will be familiar to most and unlikely to change any minds. Some of the stories ably highlight the laws’ arbitrariness and unfairness, such as the one about a death-row inmate’s lawyers who missed the deadline for a last-minute appeal due to a computer crash. But many of Sinclair’s overstated assertions may alienate more readers than they convince. While most people probably agree that murder is worse than rape, they may not be so quick to concur with the statement that “raping a child is despicable, but killing someone is far worse.” Other choices are simply odd, as when the author quotes at length from Thomas Wolfe’s 1939 novel The Web and the Rock to convey “the mindset of lynch justice.” The best sections, regrettably few, deal with the author’s personal experiences, as when he tries to convince a prisoner to plead to a life sentence rather than risk execution..
A disappointing screed that ultimately adds little to the death-penalty debate.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-55970-899-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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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