Touching, inspiring and at times frightening: a tangible demonstration of the healing powers of art.
What do you do with a convicted killer who has a poetic bent? If you’re Richard Shelton, you help him.
Sometime around 1964, a sociopath named Charles Schmid murdered three young girls, for which he received a sentence of 50-years-to-life at the Arizona State Prison Complex. In 1970, Schmid wrote a note to Shelton, a poet and assistant English professor at the University of Arizona, requesting his thoughts on the prisoner’s poetry. Fast-forward 30 years, by which point the author had spent hours upon hours teaching, and cajoling and inspiring scores of prisoners throughout the state to use words as their weapons. His engrossing memoir introduces us to National Book Award–winner Jimmy Santiago Baca, who initially annoyed Shelton with his incessant kvetching about prison life; bipolar savant Billy Aberg; fellow teacher Will Clipman, who once accidently brought a couple of joints to a prison; and a large handful of other inmates and their mentors, all of whom more than merit inclusion in this literary redemption song. An oft-published poet, Shelton (The Last Person to Hear Your Voice, 2007, etc.) here sublimates any lyrical proclivities and delivers his story in a simple, straight-ahead and occasionally gritty prose. Some may regret the fact that only a handful of the prisoners’ poems are included, but it was a wise decision: Too much poetry would have brought the narrative to multiple halts. With its memorable cast of characters and its heart-in-the-right-place attitude, this stirring text has a chance to reach—and affect—a large audience.
Touching, inspiring and at times frightening: a tangible demonstration of the healing powers of art.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8165-2594-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Arizona
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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