Despite its flaws, hard to put down, and harder to forget.
A jolting, unusual memoir from the ultimate fish out of water: a middle-aged MBA who pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter.
Brooklyn-born Lerner, a former Pacific Bell executive who comes off as a wittier version of every cellular-equipped guy in a Lexus, saw his world destroyed after he inadvertently strangled an unhinged, violent acquaintance following a booze-and-gambling binge. Charged with murder, he accepted a two-to-twelve-year sentence in 1998. Overwhelmed by the Dickensian sadism and Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the Nevada prison system, he used his immersion in corporate self-help maxims (a gag that grows tiresome) to adapt to this new environment of hostile takeovers. While Lerner is threatened with sodomy, mocked for his genteel background, and occasionally pursued by roughnecks like Big Hunger (“This banana be mines!”), little physical harm befalls him: his cellmate and friend Kansas is a “shotcaller” among the Nazi prisoners (Lerner neglected to mention his Semitic roots); the other inmates laugh at his “side-talking” witticisms and appreciate his help with sentencing figures, personal-ad writing, and legal jargon. Even Kansas’s white-power acolytes seem a jolly bunch, once Lerner assigns them the Seven Dwarfs’ nicknames. The unrelenting viciousness of many of the jail’s COs, however, runs as a disquieting undercurrent about the realities of imprisonment in post–Drug War, “Tough On Crime” America. The final quarter here is weakest, as Lerner melodramatically depicts the yearlong struggle with divorce, corporate bloodletting, alcoholism, and recovery that culminated in the Las Vegas incident. Whatever the author’s personal failings, his depiction of contemporary prison life (he remains incarcerated, following a parole approval that was later denied) is invaluable: humorous, crisply detailed, and sometimes heartbreaking, as when his attuned suburban eye captures the desolate loneliness of once-youthful gangsters 20 years into their life-without-parole sentences. Ironically, Lerner’s white-collar Everyman perspective may force readers to truly see the cruel inequities of our current system.
Despite its flaws, hard to put down, and harder to forget.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-0918-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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