by Norval Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2001
An important story that deserves far better treatment. (3 halftones, 3 maps)
In a volume with a highly misleading, unsuitable title, a criminologist fictionalizes the experiences of Alexander Maconochie, the crusading superintendent of the prison on Norfolk Island in the early 1840s.
Morris (ed., The Oxford History of the Prison, not reviewed) had a terrific tale to tell—the story of a man who believed that humanizing the conditions of prisons would improve the lives of the men who would ultimately return to society. He believed his theories so fervently that he convinced the authorities to allow an experiment on Norfolk Island (1,000 miles east of Australia) where resided 2,000 of the most intractable convicts. And in 1840—with his wife and six children—he arrived at the island and proceeded to implement his ideas. Within four years, he had profoundly transformed the place—instituting what he called his “Marks System,” by which convicts earned points to reduce the length of their sentences. Convicts worked farms, ran a library, organized a band, performed a scene from Richard II, and generally confirmed Maconochie’s faith in them. But instead of writing biography or history, Morris decided to write a . . . well, novel. The first 159 pages contain a dreadful fictionalized version of Maconochie’s tenure, told in silly, ill-written monologues by Maconochie, his nubile daughter Minnie (who falls in love with her convict piano teacher), and two fictitious prisoners (one is the librarian, the other the pianist). Maconochie tells us about one of his nocturnal emissions; we hear Minnie complain, “It was just so monstrously unfair”; the librarian tells the pianist: “Quit thinking with your penis and realise what a narrow ledge we walk on.” Following this feckless fiction are brief accounts of what happened to Maconochie and Norfolk Island and then two mildly interesting (and awkwardly written) essays on prison conditions and on lessons we can learn from Maconochie. With neither index nor bibliography, the volume is useless for the scholarly or the curious.
An important story that deserves far better treatment. (3 halftones, 3 maps)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-514607-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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