A well-reconstructed history of one of America’s worst prisons for women.
The neglected story of the “Skyscraper Alcatraz,” a notorious women’s prison where inmates included Angela Davis and Ethel Rosenberg.
As Ryan, the author of When Brooklyn Was Queer, demonstrates, for much of the 20th century, Greenwich Village was “the epicenter of women’s incarceration in New York, and the epicenter of queer life in America.” The author examines how the two realities intersected and rippled outward in an impressively researched study of the Women’s House of Detention. Ryan’s narrative is part history, part horror story, and part blistering critique of the country’s “criminal legal system” (a term he sees as more accurate than “criminal justice system”). Dubbed the House of D, the prison operated from 1929 until the early 1970s and was demolished after riots by inmates helped to expose its dangerously overcrowded and inhumane conditions. Although intended for short-term female prisoners awaiting trial or sentencing, the 11-story, vermin-infested building held “women and transmasculine people” for months or even years, crammed into small cells with no recreational, educational, or vocational programs and woeful medical care: “The dentist had so little time per prisoner that all he did, regardless of the complaint, was pull teeth,” writes Ryan. “There was no gynecologist, or any doctor at all on premises most nights and weekends.” The staff subjected new arrivals to forced enemas and other invasive procedures, overdrugged inmates with Thorazine, and for a time forced gender-nonconforming prisoners to wear a D for degenerate on their uniforms. In reconstructing this chilling history, Ryan had rare access to private social work files that enabled him to tell detailed personal stories of prisoners, who could be sent to the House of D for crimes such as “waywardism,” “wearing pants,” and “lesbianism itself.” While his narrative has strong LGBTQ+ interest, it also belongs on the shelf with books about judicial-system failures, such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
A well-reconstructed history of one of America’s worst prisons for women.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64503-666-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.
A popular novelist turns his hand to historical writing, focusing on what shipwrecks can tell us.
There’s something inherently romantic about shipwrecks: the mystery, the drama of disaster, the prospect of lost treasure. Gibbins, who’s found acclaim as an author of historical fiction, has long been fascinated with them, and his expertise in both archaeology and diving provides a tone of solid authority to his latest book. The author has personally dived on more than half the wrecks discussed in the book; for the other cases, he draws on historical records and accounts. “Wrecks offer special access to history at all…levels,” he writes. “Unlike many archaeological sites, a wreck represents a single event in which most of the objects were in use at that time and can often be closely dated. What might seem hazy in other evidence can be sharply defined, pointing the way to fresh insights.” Gibbins covers a wide variety of cases, including wrecks dating from classical times; a ship torpedoed during World War II; a Viking longship; a ship of Arab origin that foundered in Indonesian waters in the ninth century; the Mary Rose, the flagship of the navy of Henry VIII; and an Arctic exploring vessel, the Terror (for more on that ship, read Paul Watson’s Ice Ghost). Underwater excavation often produces valuable artifacts, but Gibbins is equally interested in the material that reveals the society of the time. He does an excellent job of placing each wreck within a broader context, as well as examining the human elements of the story. The result is a book that will appeal to readers with an interest in maritime history and who would enjoy a different, and enlightening, perspective.
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781250325372
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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