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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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