Not a tremendously hopeful work, but Gordon's audaciousness in regarding the condemned as creative citizens is memorable and...
A surprising—and frequently searing—examination of the prison experience, seen from both inside and out.
Novelist Gordon (When Bobby Kennedy Was a Moving Man, 1993) ran intensive writing workshops in Washington State prisons for nine years, until funding was ignominiously truncated. He initially explores the contemporary explosion in incarceration, noting that imprisonment rates have doubled in the last decade, even while the American people are "in no hurry to lay claim to the prisoners in our midst." As implied by his title, he views this reluctance to consider the realities of the imprisonment surge as akin to willful blindness in the face of a ghastly, distorted civic reflection. In contrast, his enthusiasm for his prison teaching experience is palpable: he offers strong tales of prisoners who found release and grace in writing, and discovered the joys of its inherent craftsmanship. Gordon maintains a wry, informed stance that strengthens his arguments regarding prisoner humanity and the pure (and vicious) moral relativism that prisons breed—particularly in the "get-tough" era, when even education and the simplest privileges are stripped away. Additionally, he culls a variety of memorable pieces in distinctive voices from the current and former prisoners he's taught. Yet their writing surges with edgy awareness and hard-won insights: memorable essays range from an attempted murderer's chillingly humorous tips on prison survival ("Commit an Honorable Crime . . . Keep a Good Porn Collection") to a twice-convicted rapist—now held indefinitely according to new Orwellian notions of civil commitment—recounting the violence and contempt accorded sex offenders (who stand lowest on the convict pecking order, along with snitches). Gordon's finely honed stance is most haunting: he draws difficult conclusions regarding the humanity of his charges, he portrays their absurdist moments of honesty or altruism, and he testifies convincingly about the power of writing to foster discipline and engagement with the world—perhaps to stifle criminal nihilism.
Not a tremendously hopeful work, but Gordon's audaciousness in regarding the condemned as creative citizens is memorable and gripping.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-87422-198-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
