A pulpy, well-crafted recollection of time behind bars packed with unsettling questions about society’s embrace of mass...
A tense account of a rakish, unrepentant cannabis merchant’s time in prison.
Stratton, a former editor and publisher of High Times, follows up his previous memoir, Smuggler’s Blues: A True Story of the Hippie Mafia (2016), with this sequel, beginning with his 1982 apprehension after jumping bail on a federal indictment in Maine. Prosecutors made his punishment a high priority, securing a 15-year sentence in that case and an additional indictment over a large shipment of hashish. For his part, Stratton avers, “I am glad that I decided to take the heat and do the time. The government is simply wrong when it comes to criminalizing this plant.” He documents his odyssey through the federal prison system, where he learned to be his own lawyer, growing enamored with the power of language in both law and creative writing. The author notes that the government’s fervor was also motivated by anger over his friendship with Norman Mailer: “For fuck’s sake, give them Mailer and you walk. This is the era of government star-fucking in drug cases.” As a high-profile prisoner, Stratton was shipped to several notorious institutions, like Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correction Center, packed with mobsters like John Gotti (other notorious figures like Whitey Bulger lurk in the background here). Stratton’s portrait of prison life is unsparing, and he notes that drugs remain ubiquitous and questions the pointless, punitive nature of the prisoners’ daily experience. Yet he fondly regards the bonds formed with his fellow condemned (to whom he provided legal guidance) and his own hard-won inner growth: “The time I spent in this restricted space…entered me and changed me.” This prison memoir stands out due to Stratton’s elite criminal status and also the quality of his writing, which tends to be observant, mordant, and sometimes hilariously vulgar.
A pulpy, well-crafted recollection of time behind bars packed with unsettling questions about society’s embrace of mass imprisonment and the drug war.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62872-726-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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