There are things, says Lamb, that need “to be known about prison and prisoners. There are misconceptions to be abandoned,...
Intense attestations of lives that ran afoul of the law, from women who have done or are doing time at a prison in Connecticut.
Bestselling novelist Lamb (I Know This Much Is True, 1998, etc.) teaches a course in writing at the York Correctional Institution, and he offers here a selection of ten works from the women in his class, plus one by his co-instructor. The pieces are uniformly wrenching, reported from desperate circumstances by authors doomed to punishment. Yet they are as far from self-pity as possible, written by extremely self-aware authors who give a clear sense of setting out to take some degree of control of their destinies. Each piece is a probing re-examination of its author’s life and of the reasons she ended up in prison. Some recount childhoods taxing by any yardstick, years of learning to become “experts at detecting the slightest barometric fluctuations of Storm Mom,” or of being raped by a father who’d just lost the house in a card game—and, at term, having the baby spirited away before its mother was allowed to touch him. There are demons aplenty, inner ones begging to be tamed by drugs, and outer ones, like husbands, uncontrollable (one woman asks, “Why do I feel safer here in prison than I felt at home?”). The maximum-security prison is a tough house, and prospects of release for some of the writers are dim: “Ineligible for parole, I have served the first nine years of my twenty-five year sentence. I am 27.” This same person will also say, “I’m kept afloat by my writing.” And her writing, like other of the women’s, is lean, with the momentum and clarity needed for its work of helping frame and make sense of these authors’ situations.
There are things, says Lamb, that need “to be known about prison and prisoners. There are misconceptions to be abandoned, biases to be dropped.” Here’s a step in that direction.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-053429-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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