An emotional account that will particularly interest prisoners and their families.
Rutkin’s debut memoir recalls her yearlong separation from her husband, a cop, as he was imprisoned for stealing money from drug dealers.
In 1976, the author’s new husband, Matthew Smith, was indicted on charges of grand larceny—just four days into their honeymoon. After a drug bust the previous year, five officers had stolen $30,000 in cash from the suspects; Smith’s share of the take had been $3,000. (“They weren’t doing anything different than anyone else on the job,” he later told Rutkin for this book.) Smith refused to turn state’s evidence against other cops, and beginning in September 1977, he served 366 days in prison. Rutkin was understandably angry, as well as sad, lonely, and worried; she also had financial troubles, including bankruptcy, to handle. But she was determined to bolster her husband through his depression, isolation, shame, and fear. The couple wrote to each other nearly every day in letters filled “with our love and longing, with day-to-day, hour-to-hour chronologies of our comings and goings.” Over time, Rutkin learned to address her own emotional needs and detach when cheering up her husband became exhausting. At length, the couple resumed a normal life after his release in 1978, and they’re still married today. Although readers may not have much sympathy for Smith at first, his letters and Rutkin’s writing provide a balanced view of events. Extracts from Smith’s well-written letters give readers vivid glimpses of prison life—jobs, friendships, his attempts to better his placement—as well as of his own feelings; they portray a sensitive, intelligent man with a deep need for belonging. Rutkin’s contemporary comments strengthen the memoir by adding nuance to the story told in the letters: “I choke on the dreams that flit through them…I get dizzy with these pages and pages of pie-in-the-sky affirmations.” But although the book is insightful, some readers may not find the separation to be as significant as Rutkin does, due to its relative brevity.
An emotional account that will particularly interest prisoners and their families.Pub Date: May 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4685-3921-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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