An inspiring but never saccharine study of one prisoner’s redemption.
The life story of the author, who spent 44 years in prison thanks to an inept, often racist Louisiana criminal-justice system.
That’s not to say Rideau was a wrongly imprisoned innocent. In 1961 he was an angry 19-year-old who robbed a bank in Lake Charles, La., and took three employees hostage. When a hostage bolted from his car, he panicked, shooting one and stabbing another. The Louisiana jury that freed him in 2005 determined that his lack of premeditation merited only a manslaughter charge, but at the time he was charged with murder, after a biased trial in which prosecutors claimed he conducted a cold-blooded killing execution-style. The book is a testimony to his hopeful temperament, as well as a glimpse into the complex and violent society inside Louisiana prisons. His writing on prison rape, racism and poor management is firmly objective without being bloodless, reflecting the author’s work as a staffer and eventual editor of the Angolite, the magazine published at Louisiana State Penitentiary (aka “Angola”). Under his stewardship, the Angolite exposed numerous serious flaws in the prison system, such as routine electric-chair malfunctions, and Rideau’s reporting earned him national attention and mainstream journalism awards. In some ways the book more closely resembles the memoir of a media mogul than a prison memoir—its pages chronicle numerous tussles between prison authorities over what he could and could not publish. Though the narrative is stuffed with detail about legal points regarding his trials, Rideau isn’t narcissistic. He gives plenty of attention to the difficulties that prisoners suffered, and how much damage law-and-order Louisiana politicking—and well-meaning activists—could do to their morale. His deepest respect is reserved for his girlfriend (now wife) Linda, who spent more than a decade working toward his release. The brief closing chapter emphasizes how much freedom transformed him, as the narrative shifts from legal concerns to navigating supermarkets, caring for his cats and starting a new life.
An inspiring but never saccharine study of one prisoner’s redemption.Pub Date: May 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26481-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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