A startling, disturbing narrative that shows the continuing social costs of wrongful conviction and the drug war.
Gritty account of a music producer’s wrongful conviction for drug trafficking and his eventual legal triumph.
Wright’s overlong yet engrossing memoir (co-written with Sternfeld) encompasses a sharp exposé of mass incarceration and the quest for legal self-discovery, and the author shows how his success as a hip-hop promoter attracted the attention of a corrupt New Jersey prosecutor and his police minions. “I was at a nexus of all these people, the nucleus of the well-off, the famous, and the local hustlers,” he writes. “It put me on the radar of a joint drug unit that Middlesex County formed with neighboring Somerset County.” After acquaintances were pressured to implicate him, Wright was arrested in 1989 and convicted two years later under an ill-conceived “kingpin law,” which the author describes as “a conspiracy law with a laughably low burden of proof….As written, the statute gave a life sentence to someone for having a conversation that no one had to prove ever happened.” Yet the discovery of the prison law library gave him an unexpected new direction for dealing with his plight: “Educating myself in the law was my form of resistance.” This began with the seemingly reckless decision to represent himself. “Acting as your own lawyer, especially in a case this serious and complex, was close to unheard of,” he writes. At the notorious Trenton State Prison, Wright joined the Inmate Legal Association, worked on his own appeals, and won respect by providing aid to other inmates and forcing change in the abysmal treatment of mentally ill prisoners. In a dramatic climax, Wright chronicles how he elicited a courtroom admission of police malfeasance, which collapsed the case against him. Though the prose is sometimes repetitive, the author discusses the intricacies of his legal journey in clear, forceful terms, and the case’s complexities and Wright’s fight for justice (the prosecutor was eventually himself convicted) maintain suspense.
A startling, disturbing narrative that shows the continuing social costs of wrongful conviction and the drug war.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-25027-748-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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