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A FEW KIND WORDS AND A LOADED GUN

Name: A FEW KIND WORDS AND A LOADED GUN
Author: Razor Smith
ISBN: 1-556-52571-0

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CAREER CRIMINAL

by Razor Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2005

A regretful, thoroughly well-written memoir that closes with these defiant words: “I never slashed a face that wasn’t...

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“Like the ghost of Jacob Marley, I have spent my life carefully fashioning the chains that now bind me, link by link”: a graphic, memorable chronicle of a life spent causing mayhem.

Noel Stephen Smith—the “Razor” bit comes from his favorite weapon—grew up in the depressed Thatcherite England of a quarter-century past, a child of low-income housing estates and the streets. He could have been a laborer or a delivery boy; instead, he records, he took what seemed the easier way out and began robbing, fighting, stabbing. For this he spent his teendom in the last of Britain’s borstals, a since-abolished hell that trained him thoroughly for a life of crime. Whereas some long-imprisoned criminals turn to religion, Smith took to the pen and, in the late 1990s, became something of a literary sensation by writing impassioned accounts of his servitude. To be sure, places like Wormwood Scrubs can’t be any fun, but Smith doesn’t shy from acknowledging that he had put himself in harm’s way from a very early age on; there’s no society-made-me pleading here but plenty of rueful remembrance. (Example: “There are many pockets of loneliness in the life of the unsuccessful career criminal . . . but none is as torturously poignant as being conveyed through familiar streets in a prison van heading for incarceration.”) Elsewhere, though, Smith writes with workmanly pride of bank robberies committed, fights fought, screws put to prison screws, and escapes effected. American readers may marvel that a life sentence in England seems to translate to eight years or so, depending mostly on the mood of the nearest guard, but there’s no question that Smith will be behind bars for years to come; he reckons that even with the most lenient of terms he won’t be out until 2013.

A regretful, thoroughly well-written memoir that closes with these defiant words: “I never slashed a face that wasn’t looking at me, and I never robbed a bank that wasn’t insured.”

Pub Date: April 1, 2005

ISBN: 1-556-52571-0

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)