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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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