A vivid portrait of endurance behind bars.
A memoir of incarceration, literature, and redemption.
For one week in August 2003, 25-year-old Genis robbed people at knifepoint to support his $100-per-day heroin habit. Although he immediately told his victims he was sorry, the “Apologetic Bandit” was given a 12-year sentence—10 with good behavior— by a judge who thought the White, middle-class NYU graduate “should have known better.” In a sharp, wry memoir, the author, a journalist and translator, chronicles his life in a dozen compounds in upstate New York, including four maximum security prisons, a world “utterly unknown” to those outside prison walls. He reflects on some of the 1,046 books—by Dostoevsky, Primo Levi, Solzhenitsyn, Proust, among many others—that he read while an inmate. “Reading’s evolution into writing,” he found, “made the difference between merely surviving ten years of incarceration and finding meaning in it.” Each chapter focuses on “a specific demographic slice of the incarcerated population”—Blacks, Latinos, gang members, and the mentally ill, for example—or a facet of prison life, such as food, solitary confinement, methods of smuggling in drugs and weapons, rare conjugal visits, and the particular cruelties of being transported on prison buses. Like an anthropologist, Genis sees prison “as a laboratory to study how men self-organize into societies, and watching that development is effectively a look into our Stone Age past.” He notes the codes, behaviors, assumptions, and prejudices that factored into group affiliation. “Race,” he writes, “mattered to an extent I had never witnessed previously. It was both a reason to oppress and to redress perceived wrongs.” As a White man, he found it impossible to “not have some relationship with the concept of white power. One cannot be neutral on the subject; the other prisoners do not allow it. Being white means being a minority, and a hated one at that.” The author’s voice is insightful, candid, and sometimes darkly humorous.
A vivid portrait of endurance behind bars.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-42955-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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An intimate, stirring chronicle.
A daughter’s memories.
Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne’er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother’s demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titled The God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” Arundhati sets her life in the context of India’s roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior.” Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter’s life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. “I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her.” Without her, “I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.” Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.
An intimate, stirring chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094716
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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PERSPECTIVES
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