A brave, honest search for answers regarding incarceration.
An impassioned look inside the lives of a few inmates, “flawed, damaged, and culpable, but still human.”
In her unconventional examination of two individuals—her adopted brother and a notorious mobster—with complicated criminal records and histories of incarceration, poet, activist, and educator Imarisha (Scars/Stars, 2013, etc.) offers raw, breathing portraits of human fallibility as well as a searingly candid look at her own life: her radical evolution since reading Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Live from Death Row as a biracial teenager growing up in a small town and her early development of a “mass of contradictions and complexities: colors that clash and fight for dominance.” Through a newspaper advertisement, the then-15-year-old author befriended Kakamia Jahad Imarisha, a white Puerto Rican youth originally from Brooklyn, in jail for conspiracy to commit murder. Kakamia had moved with his mother to California in the 1980s and gotten caught up in a contract murder of a friend’s parents, eventually serving 25 years in California prisons. The author and Kakamia became kindred spirits. Imarisha does not sugarcoat the crime, yet her depiction of her adopted brother’s “soul-crushing” despair, his stifling, dangerous, gang-driven life in prison, and redeeming discovery and mastery of art, as well as her own emotionally fraught visits to him, provide a poignant look inside the lives of people we would rather not see or hear about. Similarly, through the account of former hit man Jimmy “Mac” MacElroy, whom she originally interviewed as a journalist, Imarisha records the life of a once-fascinating mobster washed up in his 60s and largely without hope. In between these moving accounts, the author inserts her own story of assault by a boyfriend and eventual abortion in order to grapple with the issues of accountability and forgiveness. She embraces the human side of criminals beyond the statistics (the title derives from the 1938 James Cagney film) and sets forth alternatives to brutal incarceration that involve “transformative justice.”
A brave, honest search for answers regarding incarceration.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-84935-174-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: AK Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
How can the loss of the Chantbury Pyx, a priceless reliquary stolen from a Bath gallery, be related to the murder of Mrs. Pryce, a vicious old biddy whose complaint to Lance Tyler's private inquiry agency about flowers purloined from her garden makes it all too easy for Tyler's partner, Joanna Mackenzie, to identify her when she's struck down with a hammer? Inspector James Carrick, Joanna's former superior officer and former lover (she lost her CID job over the affair), is thunderstruck by the possibility that the same hammer may have been used in both crimes. He's struck in other, more dramatic ways as well: After a brutal attack in her home leaves Mackenzie nearly dead, Carrick, returning to the flat to check the windows, ends up joining her in sick bay. Which of Mrs. Pryce's neighbors—the sweet-toothed agoraphobe with a biker boyfriend, the boorish fan of raucous modern music, the nursing home matron whose cats have a high accident rate, the army veteran subject to blackouts, or Carrick's own retired schoolmistress—can be responsible for a series of felonies ranging from stolen flowers and poisoned cats to murder? Duffy (Who Killed Cock Robin?, 1990, etc.) etches her unlovely characters so sharply that it's a shame the plot keeps snatching you away from them just as you're getting nicely acquainted. Plucky, angry Mackenzie in particular would be well worth a sequel.
Pub Date: Dec. 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11295-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An alarming and inspiring message that will hopefully spur much-needed action.
The story of one woman’s call to ease the atrocious human suffering in the Congo.
Settling in Portland, Ore., in her late 20s, photographer Shannon thought her life was in place. Everything shifted, however, when she learned of the war and unthinkable tragedies taking place in the Congo, a conflict borne out of the Rwandan genocide that had become muted in the international community. Already running from her father’s death, she decided to run 30 miles and raise 30 sponsorships for Congolese women through Women for Women, an international NGO for female survivors of war. Hoping to spark a movement, she created a foundation called Run for Congo Women and traveled through the country to meet the women she helped sponsor. Shannon presents images of the uncensored horror stories that, to many Congolese, have become regrettably routine: Congo’s vile colonial history and the Rwandan genocide spillover that has caused the murders of more than five million Congolese people; children forced to kill and rape in their own communities; daily child deaths from easily curable illnesses; grisly murders of men and children in front of their wives and mothers; families burned alive inside their homes; women who must choose between rape and watching their children starve. The author writes from a place of determination and clarity, despair and breakdown, overwhelming love and hope. Juxtaposing brutality with beauty, Shannon’s direct prose is a stirring reminder that these horrors are real and ongoing.
An alarming and inspiring message that will hopefully spur much-needed action.Pub Date: April 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58005-296-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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