by Danner Darcleight ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 30, 2016
A provocative work focused on empathy and redemption rather than the setting’s natural grime and melodrama.
Candid account of life in a maximum security prison.
Darcleight has served more than 17 years of a 25-to-life sentence for murdering his parents while in thrall to addiction. “I am responsible,” he writes, “but absent heroin, I’d still have my parents....Self-loathing accompanies my grief.” The author captures the complex relationship between guilt and imprisonment, arguing that many prisoners endeavor to live an ordered life and “recast [their] predicament into an opportunity for growth.” Darcleight developed a passion for writing and deep friendships: “We understood that we enjoyed better luck than our peers, living better than most of our brethren...[despite] how precarious is living well in prison.” Additionally, he credits marriage to a civilian woman for his stability, though this relationship resulted in a punitive transfer to a distant prison: “Despite being shackled and under armed guard, I feel an exhilarating sense of freedom traveling through the world, sharing the road with citizens.” In asking readers to look beyond “the abstract label of me, the murderer,” he’s able to focus on the absurdities and hidden rituals of imprisonment, starting with the distorted expectations of civilians regarding gangs and violence, “given soft-core gore-porn treatment in pop culture.” Darcleight argues that the fascination with sexual assault between inmates both overstates the problem and simplifies such aspects as staff collusion. “Rape,” he writes, “is one of the few prison issues for which the public has an appetite.” Similarly, drug trafficking within the walls seems inevitable given that “sobriety is indeed a cruel mirror for those who have destroyed like we’ve destroyed.” The author alternates cohesive chapters on his prison experiences with more rambling ones recalling his early life of privilege, a callous youngster careening toward tragedy without realization. The distance between Darcleight’s current perspective and his destructive past underscores his argument that the lives of the imprisoned warrant consideration.
A provocative work focused on empathy and redemption rather than the setting’s natural grime and melodrama.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-57962-437-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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