Virginian-Pilot editor Burke and writer Jackson produce a dark epic chronicling the only multiple escape from death row, and the redemption of a man condemned for a killing likely not his own doing, in that rare volume that is at once a taut, gripping true-crime ride and a disturbing indictment of the nether regions of criminal justice. Career criminal Dennis Stockton received a 1983 death sentence for a 1978 murder only tenuously tied to him, and was sent to Mecklenberg, a supposedly —escape-proof— prison, in reality deeply compromised by collusion between cowed guards and convicted killers with nothing to lose. Led by the notoriously vicious Briley brothers, six prisoners pulled off an astounding escape that involved capturing a dozen guards and forcing an officer to simulate a bomb scare; yet Stockton stayed behind, in hopes of proving his innocence in court. Later, he sent his —Death Row Diary— to the authors; his disclosures amplified the escape scandal, and embarrassed officials sent Stockton on a long tour of Virginia’s worst penal institutions. Stockton was executed in 1995 in the midst of growing attention to unearthed discrepancies in his case, and evidence including signed affidavits asserting the real killer’s identity. This grim tale is transformed into something more weighty than mere violent pulp by its audacious portrayals of the prisoners; without minimizing their ghastly deeds, Jackson and Burke evoke their doomed humanity and the strength they needed to survive the elaborate terrors of a death sentence. The centerpiece of the escape plot is rendered authentically, as great ingenuity in the face of desperate odds—an irresistible drama. And Stockton himself emerges memorably, an incorrigible crook transformed through craft and late bravery. Though the authors— prose is brisk and engaging, the generous implication throughout is that this self-taught writer’s perceptions and observations are paramount. Even jaded readers, attentions captured by the pyrotechnical escape plot, will recognize the likely injustice in Stockton’s state-sanctioned fate.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8129-3206-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
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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