A disturbingly honest memoir.
An ex-con tells the story of life inside the California state prison system.
In 2005, Perez (full name Darnell Riley Perez) was “a year removed from my last criminal act”: breaking into Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis’ Bel Air home, videotaping Francis in compromising positions, and using the resulting footage to extort money. Then, without warning, two armed U.S. Marshalls captured Perez at his home. In this gritty memoir, the author details the decade he spent behind bars. His first experiences at the LA County jail lockup showed him just how difficult incarceration could be. The cramped cells had no windows and no clocks, and the prison moved inmates around often, creating a sense of instability. Corrections officers carried out everything from full body searches to meal service “with the same level of hate for the process as the inmates.” A majority of convicts were involved in notorious gangs like the Crips, Bloods, and the Asian Boyz, divided along racial lines. Perez identified himself as a more-or-less neutral “Other” and managed to stay out of most intergang confrontations. But loneliness and separation from family and friends took its toll. With an almost frightening sangfroid, he writes about collecting a secret stash of sleeping pills to use in case his trial “was a failure.” In early 2006, Perez was formally charged and sentenced to 10 years and moved to the Corcoran State Prison, which housed convicted murderer Charles Manson. A female corrections officer briefly made a sexually frustrated Perez one of her “personal sex performers” and watched him masturbate when he was alone in his cell. Later, he became a “soldier” in a private war between convicts and assaulted an inmate who had not paid a debt to another. Grim, unrelenting, and at times difficult to read, the book takes readers on a journey to the dark side of both prison life and human nature.
A disturbingly honest memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947856-26-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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