A rewarding testament to a life's work, and a treasure trove for true-crime buffs. (35 b&w photos throughout, 1 b&w...
An engaging history of Trenton State Prison by a man who spent his career there.
Harry Camisa spent 50 years inside one of New Jersey's toughest maximum-security facilities. Beginning as a corrections officer in 1950, he retired in 1979, then returned to the prison as a civilian employee, remaining on staff until 2002. During that time, he witnessed 13 executions, befriended numerous murderers, rapists and thieves, and watched the changes in society as a whole–and specifically its philosophy about corrections–reverberate within the walls of the prison. He relates his observations and experiences in compelling detail, offering a close look at the structure of the prison itself and its evolution over time, as well as first-hand impressions of several notorious inmates: Rubin "Hurricane" Carter; Dutch Schultz's assassin, Charlie "the Bug" Workman; serial killer Rich Biegenwald; Jesse Timmendequas, whose rape and murder resulted in the passage of "Megan's Law"; and accountant/killer John List, a fugitive for 17 years who was finally captured after being featured on America's Most Wanted. In each case, Camisa presents his perspective based on his own interactions with the prisoners, as well as extensive descriptions of their crimes, captures, trials and, in certain cases, escape attempts. Though co-authored by Camisa and Franklin, the voice throughout is entirely Camisa's, and the research on the included cases blends naturally with his personal reflections. Aside from his remarkably humane, non-judgmental acceptance of some of society's worst, he offers his deepest introspection when describing the electrocutions he witnessed–the powerful feelings evoked by watching a man die, and his continued ambivalence about capital punishment.
A rewarding testament to a life's work, and a treasure trove for true-crime buffs. (35 b&w photos throughout, 1 b&w illustration)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9726473-0-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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