A novel glimpse behind the scenes of an incarceration facility during a radical period in American history.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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