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
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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