George (The Bishop’s Folly, 2014, etc.) offers a memoir about his time spent working at an infamous California prison.
In 1971, a failed escape attempt at San Quentin State Prison in California resulted in violence and, later, a trial for six suspects known as the San Quentin Six. The events of that day were nothing short of brutal and included multiple deaths; as inmates attacked guards with crude weapons, their goal was often to cut their adversaries’ arteries. At the time of the escape attempt, the author worked at the Sierra Conservation Center, a minimum security facility in Sonora. Later, after he transferred to San Quentin, he had firsthand contact with the San Quentin Six, among other famous criminals, including Charles Manson. George takes readers on a journey that includes a variety of hardened criminals (including weapon-toting members of the Aryan Brotherhood and a man with the unfortunate nickname of “Pincushion”) and never questions the severity of prison life. The author strikes a good balance throughout, showing contempt for both unrepentant murderers and their often inhumane conditions, and he comes across as a man who did his best to stay human and do his job, despite the unthinkable characters around him. Some conclusions seem obvious (e.g., “A prisoner, one who has been locked up for ten years, does not think like a normal person”). However, many events prove the old adage of truth being stranger than fiction, as when counterculture figure Ram Dass came to the prison to lead a meditation “with full beard, cheerfully serene smiles and wearing light, gauzy Yoga attire.” An ending chapter on Manson (and a somewhat puzzling poem about him) feels tacked on, but at less than 200 pages, the book is a highly readable account of one man’s unique experience in a strange, often terrifying place.
A novel glimpse behind the scenes of an incarceration facility during a radical period in American history.Pub Date: May 31, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 145
Publisher: Book Baby
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
