If there were ever an argument for prison reform, it’s in these pages.
A multivocal tour of hell on Earth: the infamous prison complex that is “out of sight, hard for visitors to reach, closed, and foreboding.”
“We’re talking about a place that smelled like death, vomit, urine, feces, and like the bad train stations in New York City all wrapped up in one.” Welcome to Riker’s Island, the New York City jail, as narrated, in this case, by Yusef Salaam, detained there (wrongly, as it happens) for five years for his presumed part in the Central Park 5 case. Rikers isn’t so much a jail or prison as a series of them, with facilities for mobsters, murderers, shoplifters, youth offenders, and the mentally ill—but sometimes with such populations intermixed. No one, it seems, is quite clear on what Rikers is supposed to do: Is it to rehabilitate or to punish? Notes one defense attorney, “The lessons that are taught by virtue of the way Rikers has worked are not lessons that are constructive in the real world.” One lesson, award-winning journalist Rayman and Blau reveal in this collection of horrifying testimonials, is that it’s easy to be killed at Rikers, whether by the guards or other inmates. Another lesson is that the system protects itself: If you’re beaten to death there, it’s just collateral damage. The system treats prisoners like animals, and the prisoners oblige, in time, by losing their humanity. But not all. One Lucchese family foot soldier recounts striking a humane deal with a hungry mouse, one of an innumerable infestation: “I leave some food all the way in the corner, opposite corner of the cell, and you leave my food alone.” Such moments of understanding are altogether rare in this brutal oral history, with voices ranging from one-time corrections leader Bernard Kerik to a 15-year-old HIV–positive inmate. Nearly all agree on one point: Rikers needs to be demolished, which is now a very real possibility—save that no one knows what will succeed it.
If there were ever an argument for prison reform, it’s in these pages.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-13421-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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