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
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 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
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