A modern, inspiring companion to such works as Claude Browne’s Manchild in the Promised Land and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on...
Autobiography of the former gang leader and prison activist, executed in 2005.
Williams, who spent a quarter-century on death row, doesn’t blame the whole of his criminal past on society, though he promptly identifies as contributing factors institutional racism and the absence of a father. (“My memories of him were so remote that I could not have recognized him in a jailhouse line-up,” he writes.) A transplant from New Orleans to South Central Los Angeles, Williams spent his teenage years in what he calls a “blue rage” of maladjustment, rising in the ranks of the rapidly emerging Crips gang. One gateway to the criminal schoolyard, he writes in a moment that will resonate with those who follow the headlines, was dog-fighting. Williams’s job was to feed, water and patch up the often-mauled contestants, who would be slaughtered when they could no longer fight. “At first the sight of the blood, gore, and loss of body parts was sickening, and I felt pity for the injured dogs,” he writes. “But I became hardened to the gruesome scenes.” On to humans, from street-fighting to more deadly games, about which Williams writes matter-of-factly: “throughout the entire battle gunshots were fired, but our only goal was to beat them into submission”; “being viewed as maniacal or whacked out fed my ego.” Redemption comes with his arrival on San Quentin’s death row following a murder conviction. “Though nobody believed me,” he writes, “I proclaimed my innocence from the beginning, and I’ll never stop doing so.” Believe Williams or not, his account of educating himself behind bars and enlisting prisoners and free citizens alike in the cause of keeping others out of gangs and jail is quite affecting. A particularly moving moment comes when he meets his own son passing through San Quentin on the way to another prison.
A modern, inspiring companion to such works as Claude Browne’s Manchild in the Promised Land and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4449-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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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