An inspirational account about a man’s journey on a dark path with the bright light of redemption at its end.
In this debut book, an ex-gangster recounts the supposed glamour of street life along with horrific lessons learned in prison and disturbing secrets.
Pepe Santos was born in East New York City to a large Puerto Rican family, growing up on the streets of Brooklyn with seven siblings in the 1960s. Living on welfare and community center peanut butter and cheese; dealing with an abusive, unemployed, and alcoholic father; and refusing to tolerate school, he realized that a life hustling on the streets was a distinct possibility. But after being molested by a friend’s older brother, he discovered a darkness forming within him. What followed was the transformation of a glue-sniffing, shoplifting punk into a brutal, drug-addicted gangbanger, leaving in his wake a series of broken relationships with needy women, family members, and even his two sons. A harrowing flashback to his molestation during an attempted rape in his first stint in “Gladiator School”—aka Rikers Island—led him to a long and violent conflict with a well-connected Dominican drug dealer. But after getting out of New York, finding a good role model and a lover to hang onto, and making friends with law enforcement personnel, Santos gained a chance for introspection and redemption. LaFosse’s book reveals its biggest truth right off—that the author is Santos, once a criminal and now a mentor, counselor, and bounty hunter. Few memoirs are as bluntly candid as this one, in which the author recalls shootouts and prison life in a manner not for the fainthearted while admitting to weaponizing sex, using women, and taking drugs. The volume is incredibly dense, with something new and often tragic occurring on almost every page. Time periods are marked by trends such as graffiti art or disco, and characters like the gay pusher Lollipop and the dancing hit man Mambo leap off the page. Touching moments, such as Santos’ heartbreaking goodbye to his dying father and the accidental death of a gang member during a brawl, could easily have been lost in such a glut of information yet the narrative manages to give them their necessary weight. Numerous photographs are included, many in color, further setting each scene.
An inspirational account about a man’s journey on a dark path with the bright light of redemption at its end.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946300-75-1
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Stillwater River Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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