Compelling reading.
A former drug dealer and ex-con chronicles how he became involved in the criminal underworld and managed to escape a wrongful death sentence for murder.
Bright grew up in the 1970s and ’80s in the Florida Projects in New Orleans, where “everything a kid needed to enjoy himself didn’t work.” Although his truck-driving father came from a well-to-do family of strict Jehovah’s Witnesses, his mother came from a line of “alcoholics, armed robbers, hustlers.” Bright found himself drawn to the separate worlds—one reputable, the other shady—that each parent represented. As a young boy, he began working with Goldy, a well-connected Florida Projects drug dealer. Goldy eventually realized Bright could run his entire organization beyond the neighborhood level and put him in touch with a Miami-based Colombian drug king. By age 16, Bright became an even more powerful drug dealer than Goldy, with clients that included lawyers, musicians, and professional athletes. The square/shady dichotomy that characterized his family carried into his personal life, which included two women: one a “square” with whom Bright created a relaxed family world and the other a street hustler who actively helped Bright with his business. When a “wino,” secretly working with a New Orleans police department that “wanted [him] off the streets,” accused him of a murder he didn’t commit, Bright went to jail for nine years. He spent four of those years on death row at the notoriously brutal Angola prison, where conditions were “filthy [and] medieval.” Only after a lawyer working for a humanitarian legal organization took his case was Bright finally able to find justice, which in the end only included exoneration and no public apology for having received an unfair trial. Gritty and raw, Bright’s narrative is as fascinating as it is disturbing for what it reveals about the dark, racist underside of the American justice system.
Compelling reading.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60801-124-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: UNO Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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