A powerful, necessary book with revelatory passages on nearly every page.
A former parole officer illuminates numerous significant flaws in the American criminal justice system.
After teaching high school English and then earning a master’s degree, Hardy took a job as a parole officer in his hometown of New Orleans, which “has become emblematic of institutional decay in America.” Carrying a gun and wearing a bulletproof vest, he spent most of his days in the poverty-stricken sections of New Orleans, checking on convicted criminals paroled after serving prison time. When not meeting with parolees, Hardy was dealing with clients on probation after they had been arrested and brought before a judge but before being incarcerated by the state of Louisiana, which was “the world’s leading incarcerator” until 2018. The author understood that he would be paid modestly, work long hours, and encounter potentially dangerous situations. What he did not anticipate was the crushing case load: about 220 parolees and probationers, four times the number suggested by agency standards. To tell the narrative cohesively, Hardy focuses on seven of his clients—six men and one woman, black and white, all involved in some manner with illegal drugs. A few of the seven seem sincere about cleaning up, finding stable housing, and accepting minimum wage jobs that might lead to exiting probation or parole; the other clients show no real commitment to escaping the criminal justice system. Hardy quickly realized that budgetary constraints would severely limit the alternatives he could provide. In addition to telling the often harrowing stories of his clients, Hardy offers insights into police officers, social workers, prosecutors, judges, and, especially, his PO colleagues. In brief passages, he also illuminates how the relentlessly depressing job affects his life at home with his wife. After four years, Hardy resigned to become a special agent for the FBI. Throughout, the author is refreshingly candid with readers, who will realize that his ultimate goal is to prevent his clients from continued lives of crime, violence, or even death.
A powerful, necessary book with revelatory passages on nearly every page.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982128-59-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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