Though of some interest for their insider's view of life behind bars, the ``prison writings of Red Hog''—essays that Martin, a convicted bank robber, published in the San Francisco Chronicle while in a federal pen—are most important as the fulcrum of a freedom-of-speech battle fought in and out of court by Martin and the Chronicle against the federal prison system. Here are Martin's 50-plus essays, embedded within a personal history of their genesis and effect by Sussman, the Chronicle editor who's published Martin since 1986. Sussman begins with a brief bio of Martin (b. 1939), whose early life reads like a training sheet for a career criminal: poverty, broken home, early exposure to alcohol and guns, reform school (where the redheaded author got his nickname, for a fight over a pork chop), broken marriage, drug (opiate) addiction, bank robbery, prison. In 1986, Martin mailed Sussman a piece about AIDS in prison that combined the two traits that were to hallmark the convict's work: fascinating glimpses of prison life (here, represented by an AIDS-infected, IV-sharing, promiscuous gay male known as ``Honey Bear'') framed by a message (the prison system's refusal to deal with its rampant AIDS problem). The essay won attention, and Martin published further essays under a wary institutional eye until he wrote ``The Gulag Mentality,'' which intimated that a new warden's changes might set off a riot—and which provoked officials to place Martin in solitary, beginning the legal struggle whose rather technical recounting occupies the subsequent bulk of Sussman's text. Too many of Martin's remaining pieces also deal with the crackdown, though those written after his parole in 1992 carry a particular poignancy: Will Martin survive in the ``straight'' world? Of interest primarily to civil libertarians and hard-core prison buffs; stronger glimpses of big-house life can be found in Wilbert Rideau and Ron Wikberg's Life Sentences (1992).
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03574-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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