A disturbingly honest memoir.
An ex-con tells the story of life inside the California state prison system.
In 2005, Perez (full name Darnell Riley Perez) was “a year removed from my last criminal act”: breaking into Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis’ Bel Air home, videotaping Francis in compromising positions, and using the resulting footage to extort money. Then, without warning, two armed U.S. Marshalls captured Perez at his home. In this gritty memoir, the author details the decade he spent behind bars. His first experiences at the LA County jail lockup showed him just how difficult incarceration could be. The cramped cells had no windows and no clocks, and the prison moved inmates around often, creating a sense of instability. Corrections officers carried out everything from full body searches to meal service “with the same level of hate for the process as the inmates.” A majority of convicts were involved in notorious gangs like the Crips, Bloods, and the Asian Boyz, divided along racial lines. Perez identified himself as a more-or-less neutral “Other” and managed to stay out of most intergang confrontations. But loneliness and separation from family and friends took its toll. With an almost frightening sangfroid, he writes about collecting a secret stash of sleeping pills to use in case his trial “was a failure.” In early 2006, Perez was formally charged and sentenced to 10 years and moved to the Corcoran State Prison, which housed convicted murderer Charles Manson. A female corrections officer briefly made a sexually frustrated Perez one of her “personal sex performers” and watched him masturbate when he was alone in his cell. Later, he became a “soldier” in a private war between convicts and assaulted an inmate who had not paid a debt to another. Grim, unrelenting, and at times difficult to read, the book takes readers on a journey to the dark side of both prison life and human nature.
A disturbingly honest memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947856-26-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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
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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