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JACK AND NORMAN

A STATE-RAISED CONVICT AND THE LEGACY OF NORMAN MAILER'S "THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG"

A sympathetic telling of the life and death of an infamous convict and the ill-fated intervention of a famed writer.

In 1979, Norman Mailer published The Executioner’s Song, a novel that narrated the life and death of Gary Gilmore, a notorious killer executed in 1977. Loving (English/Texas A&M Univ.; Confederate Bushwhacker: Mark Twain in the Shadow of the Civil War, 2013, etc.) offers the back story of Mailer’s fraught relationship with the murderer whose story was eerily similar to that of Gilmore.

At the end of his mighty book, Mailer acknowledged the “exceptional letters” from Jack Henry Abbott “that delineate the code, the morals, the anguish, the philosophy, the pitfalls, the pride, and the search for inviolability of hard-line convicts.” Abbott, who said he knew Gilmore, was also a coldblooded murderer imprisoned since adolescence, reared by a punishing government. Both prisoners raged against regulation, controlling “pigs,” fellow cons, and sniveling do-gooders. Gilmore had some artistic talent, and Abbott had uncanny literary skill, founded on sophisticated reading, including Baudelaire, Kierkegaard, Rimbaud, and Marx. Abbott surely sensed an ally in Mailer, who had famously stabbed his own wife. The convict’s letters cemented a relationship with the celebrated author, and Mailer was an important voice in gaining Abbott’s parole. Eventually, Abbott released his musings in the form of In the Belly of the Beast (1981), which became a bestseller. The morning before a positive review appeared in the New York Times, he stabbed to death a blameless waiter. He was soon captured and found guilty of manslaughter. His defense was “prison paranoia”—i.e., he was trained by the state to kill. Mailer pleaded for a brief sentence because of the killer’s writerly talent, but Abbott died in prison, perhaps by his own hand. In his forthright, if sporadic report, which could have used a chronology, Loving relies on research and the available correspondence between the famed writer and the clever convict, and he reveals the odd nexus of literature and penology, the meeting of art and criminality.

A sympathetic telling of the life and death of an infamous convict and the ill-fated intervention of a famed writer.

Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-250-10699-5

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

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