In a time of widespread demands for judicial reform, this deserves wide attention.
Affecting story of false imprisonment and redemption.
Banks was living something of a dream as a popular teenage football player attending Long Beach Polytechnic High School, “a public school with private-school level expectations” that was heavily scouted by college coaches. Then he had an encounter with a fellow student that ended in bad feelings—and not just that, but a rape charge. “Maybe Mom is right,” he thought for a moment, sure he did nothing wrong. “Maybe there’s nothing to worry about.” Instead, at 16, he was sent to jail, with bail set at more than $1 million, then finally imprisoned for six years when his attorney urged him to accept a plea bargain. As he relates, Banks made good use of his time by attending school in prison and living what he calls three lives: one of memory of freedom, one of “just surviving jail, continuing to read, continuing to try to stay on the path of enlightenment,” and one of being uncertain of any kind of future as he awaited trial. Freed with the help of an initiative called the California Innocence Project, Banks secured a voice recording from his accuser recanting her charge—then, having discovered that he had long since passed his prime years for playing college ball, worked hard to secure his dream of playing pro. The author has since become an advocate for the wrongfully imprisoned, his life the subject of a film to which this book is a tie-in. What is striking about this inspirational narrative, one in a vast library of books set behind bars, is the author’s refusal to submit to rancor or bitterness. Innocent and certain of the rightness of his cause, he behaved in an exemplary way, which should have had greater effect but did not in a legal system that seems bent on punishment instead of rehabilitation.
In a time of widespread demands for judicial reform, this deserves wide attention.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982121-31-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
