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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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