SING SING FOLLIES (A MAXIMUM-SECURITY COMEDY)

Richardson profiles rare and remarkable characters in his latest set of essays.

A group of prisoners performing original comic plays in for the lifers at Sing Sing Prison. A blogger claiming to be a European heiress on the run and taking the early internet by storm. A deeply Christian doctor who travels from out of state in order to perform abortions in the last open clinic in Mississippi. These are just some of the people whom Richardson has met and profiled over the course of his journalism career, and he assembles these portraits in this volume. The seven essays all originally appeared in magazines—six in Esquire and one in New York—and they read with a raconteur breeziness. Readers will meet Michael Brown Sr., whose son’s 2014 killing by a police officer set off months of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and they’ll learn about the mental health of climatologists who spend day after day poring over grim data about our ever-warming planet. Richardson gets personal, too; in the essay “My Father, the Spy”—later expanded into a memoir—the author writes about his father, also John H. Richardson, a high-ranking member of the CIA during the Cold War, whose bitterness and reticence created a permanent rift in his relationship with his journalist son: “I would bait my father at dinner by defending communism—all your better hippies live on communes, don’t they?” remembers the author. Over the course of the volume, Richardson shows himself to be a skilled weaver of words, as when he wryly describes April 2003 as a time “when winter was still hanging around like tuberculosis and the [Iraq] war was still going strong.” More importantly, the author is a talented detective when it comes to locating human drama. Each essay has a gripping story at the center of it (one piece, which gives the collection its title, was adapted for the 2023 film Sing Sing, starring Colman Domingo) and Richardson frequently manages to touch on a larger truth about the America in which it was written.

A riveting collection of magazine journalism by a talented practitioner.