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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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