by Joseph McCarty ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 13, 2011
Documentary-type findings with a sharp literary twist.
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A young serviceman volunteers to work undercover to investigate California state prisons in McCarty’s first novel.
Why would anyone volunteer to work undercover in overcrowded and miserable living conditions inhabited by an assortment of misfits and miscreants? Perhaps they flunked out of Navy SEAL school. That’s how Joseph McCarty ends up enrolled in the military’s Research and Investigation of California’s Administration of Prisons program. He is so disgusted by his failure with the SEALs that he jumps at the chance to do something “exciting and useful for [his] country.” Seph, as he is dubbed by fellow inmates, plunges into the prison’s general population. There, he documents what many already know about life behind bars: self-imposed segregation, violence, lousy food, tension, anger, psychopathy and poor administration—basically, a system completely out of control. He also covers less familiar topics such as lingo, inmate ploys and institutional psychologies and pathologies. Seph could be a character right out of psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s classic Stanford prison experiment, internalizing the traits of the population he is monitoring. Soon enough, he ends up beating one inmate and stabbing another in two premeditated incidents, which he unapologetically describes as justifiable self-defense. The book, while fictional, is an authentic account of life behind bars gleaned from McCarty’s own decade-long incarceration. Ultimately, Seph’s submits an unorthodox set of findings in an informally written diatribe about what needs to be fixed in prison systems. The final chapter posits a twist ending that will appeal to skeptical observers of politics and society.
Documentary-type findings with a sharp literary twist.Pub Date: July 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463413231
Page Count: 296
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2015
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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PERSPECTIVES
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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