There’s plenty of pain and pleasure tucked within the details of this transcendent jailhouse memoir.
A writer’s agonizing journey through “four different New York State prisons over the span of nearly two years.”
During a particularly bleak decade in his life—during which three chapters of his biography of Timothy McVeigh were plagiarized and published in a book by a different author and publisher, without consequence, and he fell into the grip of substance abuse—journalist Stickney lost everything, including his marriage. A string of arrests and a 2014 conviction for selling drugs to an undercover police officer sent him to prison. A raw and engaging narrative that lays bare the unvarnished truths behind both addiction and incarceration, the book retraces the episodes and experiences he endured while serving his sentence. The thrust of the memoir, however, involves Stickney’s belief that he would not have survived without the intervention, assistance, and street-smart counsel of four inmates and a corrections officer, all of whom “kept [him] from going crazy.” Stickney was immediately befriended by a part Native, part Italian inmate named Bear while “Pastor Mark,” who was serving time for having a sex-charged online conversation with a 14-year-old girl who turned out to be an undercover cop, encouraged and stoked the author’s faith with a stack of Bibles and some stern words of wisdom. Gummy, one of his bunkmates, dispensed the kind of homespun wisdom that grounded Stickney when his behavior and his patience needed reining in. A convivial highway drifter named Gandhi delivered mystical guidance while Valefor, an uncommonly fair-minded, approachable corrections officer, offered protection and friendly control. Stickney refreshingly avoids sermonizing, accepting full responsibility for his wrongdoings, and his memoir rests on the gratitude he expresses for the five men who served as guideposts of hope and direction. Amid the prison theatrics, the author also delivers eye-opening facts (“many inmates are homeless upon release”), well-considered personal reflection, and the kind of intensive growth that he acknowledges was sorely needed in his life.
There’s plenty of pain and pleasure tucked within the details of this transcendent jailhouse memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61088-196-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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