A brutally candid but always humane memoir of redemption.
A convicted murderer–turned-journalist tells the story of how he became a criminal but then underwent major personal rehabilitation while serving time in prison.
Until he was 7, James (A Life Inside: A Prisoner's Notebook, 2005, etc.) lived in a poor but loving family. But then both his parents were involved in a tragic car accident that killed his mother and injured his father, Erwin Sr., who began drinking heavily as his body healed. The elder James took up with a series of women afterward; each time he did, the family experienced some stability. Inevitably, however, Erwin Sr. fell into a pattern of drunken violence, which he took out on each of his children’s new mothers and also caused him to get arrested for public brawling. Meanwhile, the shy and ever anxious James ran wild and turned into a criminal. He began to rack up charges against him for increasingly more daring thefts and discovered the “lovely calm sense of peace” that alcohol seemed to offer, all while watching his home life deteriorate. When he was not staying with his father and his latest girlfriend, James was living either with other relatives or in homes for delinquent boys. By the time he entered his 20s, he had become a drifter and pub fighter who, over the course of his many muggings and robberies, killed two people. James escaped into the French Foreign Legion before turning himself in to the British police. Prison became his salvation: while incarcerated, he earned a university degree, began writing columns for the Guardian about prison life, and met a psychologist who helped him work through his traumatic childhood and adolescence. The author’s unsparing descriptions of the abuse he suffered and then inflicted on others is often difficult to read, but his book offers hope that no matter the nature of a criminal’s actions, “it [does] not define all of who that person [is].”
A brutally candid but always humane memoir of redemption.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-294-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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