A consistently eye-opening, urgent report on the use and misuse of prisoner isolation.
How solitary confinement defined the lives of 14 former and current prison inmates.
Co-editors Pendergrass, a civil rights attorney for the ACLU, and Hoke (co-editor: Palestine Speaks, 2014), an oral historian, believe that solitary confinement “is the little-known dead end of the US criminal justice system” and that its use (and abuse) remains an atrocity. Reinforcing their viewpoints are intimate profiles of prisoners whose histories and experiences put a human face on prison trauma and aptly reflect the work both editors believe is necessary to abolish this inhumane practice. Each profile raises the more universal moral question of whether or not isolation makes the general population safer in the long run or if it’s simply a cruel and unusual method of punishment. To the editors, these biographies are emblematic of a much larger overlooked and ignored population and an issue deserving of widespread attention. Culled from two years of extensive interviews, the book shares the backgrounds of convicts varying in age and experience. Maryam, confined to “the hole” for refusing to remove a religiously sanctioned headscarf, covered her claustrophobic cell with flowers fashioned from toilet paper; Vernesia, a 25-year-old mother of three, got caught up in her fiance’s troubled past and fought for justice after he died from maltreatment; Candie, a psychologically scarred woman (who was eventually acquitted), describes her time in a rusty Rikers Island solitary cell as hellish. More harrowing is the story of Shearod, convicted of second-degree murder, who describes Michigan’s Ionia Maximum facility as loud, rat-infested, and deadly. Sonya, a transgender woman, poignantly speaks of the peace she now enjoys after years of turmoil and unrest in a penitentiary. The editors also include the deliberations and experiences of two prison officers who share their thoughts about American prison life and the controversies surrounding solitary isolation. Further bolstering this important report is an expanded appendix section providing tools for increased public awareness, the little-known history of solitary confinement, and pro-reform activism.
A consistently eye-opening, urgent report on the use and misuse of prisoner isolation.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60846-956-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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