The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell

The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell PDF Author: Joe Loya
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060508930
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Joe Loya's idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end when his mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness. In the two years before her death, Joe's extremely religious father became increasingly violent toward his two young sons-a contradiction that haunted Joe for years. Then, at age sixteen, Joe retaliated during a particularly severe beating and stabbed his father in the neck. For Joe, this was the starting point of a life of crime, and after holding up his twenty -- fourth bank, he was arrested and served seven years in prison. He continued his criminal behavior behind bars and was eventually placed in solitary confinement-the lowest of lows, even for convicts. Alone in his cell for two years, Joe was finally able to forgive his father, finding clarity, cultural insight, and redemption through writing.

The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell

The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell PDF Author: Joe Loya
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060508930
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book

Book Description
Joe Loya's idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end when his mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness. In the two years before her death, Joe's extremely religious father became increasingly violent toward his two young sons-a contradiction that haunted Joe for years. Then, at age sixteen, Joe retaliated during a particularly severe beating and stabbed his father in the neck. For Joe, this was the starting point of a life of crime, and after holding up his twenty -- fourth bank, he was arrested and served seven years in prison. He continued his criminal behavior behind bars and was eventually placed in solitary confinement-the lowest of lows, even for convicts. Alone in his cell for two years, Joe was finally able to forgive his father, finding clarity, cultural insight, and redemption through writing.

Smile at Strangers

Smile at Strangers PDF Author: Susan Schorn
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547774338
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
A rollicking memoir about the rewards of risk and the surprising facts of safety and self-defense, from a woman who has earned two black belts in her pursuit of living fearlessly.

Wiving

Wiving PDF Author: Caitlin Myer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1950691594
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The Most Anticipated Memoirs of 2020, She Reads • Bay Area Authors to Read This Summer, 7X7 A literary memoir of one woman's journey from wife to warrior, in the vein of breakout hits like Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle. At thirty-six years old, Caitlin Myer is ready to start a family with her husband. She has left behind the restrictive confines of her Mormon upbringing and early sexual trauma and believes she is now living her happily ever after . . . when her body betrays her. In a single week, she suffers the twin losses of a hysterectomy and the death of her mother, and she is jolted into a terrible awakening that forces her to reckon with her past—and future. This is the story of one woman’s lifelong combat with a culture—her “escape” from religion at age twenty, only to find herself similarly entrapped in the gender conventions of the secular culture at large, conventions that teach girls and women to shape themselves to please men, to become good wives and mothers. The biblical characters Yael and Judith, wives who became assassins, become her totems as she evolves from wifely submission to warrior independence. An electric debut that loudly redefines our notions of womanhood, Wiving grapples with the intersections of religion and sex, trauma and love, sickness and mental illness, and a woman’s harrowing enlightenment. Building on the literary tradition of difficult women who struggle to be heard, Wiving introduces an urgent, striking voice to the scene of contemporary women’s writing at a time when we must explode old myths and build new stories in their place.

News Junkie

News Junkie PDF Author: Jason Leopold
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781940207551
Category : Corruption investigation
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In "News Junkie, " the cutthroat worlds of journalism, politics, and high finance are laid bare by Jason Leopold, whose addictive tendencies led him from a life of drug abuse and petty crime to become an award-winning investigative journalist who exposed some of the biggest corporate and political scandals in recent American history. Leopold broke key stories about the California energy crisis and Enron Corporation''s infamous phony trading floor as a reporter for the Dow Jones Newswires. While he exposed high-rolling hucksters and double-dealing politicians, Leopold hid the secrets of his own felonious past, terrified that he would be discovered. When the news junkie closed in on his biggest story u one that implicated a Bush administration member u he found himself pilloried by angry colleagues and the presidentOCOs press secretary, all attempting to destroy his career. Introducing an unforgettable array of characters u from weepy editors and love-starved politicos to steroid-pumped mobsters who intimidate the author into selling drugs and stolen goods u "News Junkie" shows how a man once fueled by raging fear and self-hatred transforms his life, regenerated by love, sobriety, and a new, harmonious career with the independent media."

War by Candlelight

War by Candlelight PDF Author: Daniel Alarcon
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061860298
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Something is happening around the globe: mass movements of peoples, dislocations of language and culture in the wake of war and economic crises -- simply put, our world is changing. In this exquisite collection, Daniel Alarcón takes the reader from Third World urban centers to the fault lines that divide nations and people. Wars, both national and internal, are waged in jungles, across borders, in the streets of Lima, in the intimacy of New York apartments. These are lives at the margins of the globalized and not-yet-globalized worlds, the stories of those who shuttle between them and never quite feel at home in the cities where they were born: an unrepentant terrorist remembers where it all began, a would-be emigrant contemplates the ramifications of leaving and never coming back, a reporter turns in his pad and pencil for the inglorious costume of a street clown. War by Candlelight is a devastating portrait ofa world in flux, and Daniel Alarcón is an extraordinary new voice in literary fiction, one you will not soon forget.

Writing on the Wall

Writing on the Wall PDF Author: Mumia Abu Jamal
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
ISBN: 0872866556
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Mumia Abu Jamal’s essential perspectives on black experience, race relations, freedom, justice, social change, and the future of American society.

Perfect Reader

Perfect Reader PDF Author: Maggie Pouncey
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307474801
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Flora Dempsey is the headstrong only child of Lewis Dempsey, a college professor and world famous critic. When Lewis passes away, Flora returns to her New England hometown to act as his literary executor. There, she finds herself responsible for a manuscript that he was secretly writing at the end of his life—love poems to a girlfriend Flora didn't know he had. As Flora is besieged by well-wishers and literary vultures alike, she tries to figure out how to navigate it all: the fate of the poems, the girlfriend who wants a place in her life, the wounds left by her parents’ divorce, and her uncertain future. Brimming with energy, humor, and the elbow-patchy wisdom of Flora’s still-vivid father, this enchanting debut is the uplifting story of a young woman striving to become the “perfect reader” of her father’s life, as well as her own.

Autobiography in Black and Brown

Autobiography in Black and Brown PDF Author: Michael Nieto Garcia
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 0826355285
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Richard Wright was the grandson of slaves, Richard Rodriguez the son of immigrants. One black, the other brown, each author prominently displays his race in the title of his autobiography: Black Boy and Brown. Wright was a radical left winger, while Rodriguez is widely viewed as a reactionary. Despite their differences, Michael Nieto Garcia points out, the two share a preoccupation with issues of agency, class struggle, ethnic identity, the search for community, and the quest for social justice. Garcia’s study, the first to compare these two widely read writers, argues that ethnic autobiography reflects the complexity of ethnic identity, revealing a narrative self that is bound to a visible ethnicity yet is also protean and free. These autobiographies, according to Garcia, exemplify the tensions and contradictions inherent in identity. In their presentation of the self we see the rejection not only of essentialized notions of ethnic authenticity but also of any conception of an ethnic self that is not also communally derived. The image reflected in the mirror of autobiography also reminds us that consciousness itself is altered by our reading, and that the construction of modern ethnicity is shaped to a considerable extent by print culture.

Prison Life Writing

Prison Life Writing PDF Author: Simon Rolston
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1771125187
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Prison Life Writing is the first full-length study of one of the most controversial genres in American literature. By exploring the complicated relationship between life writing and institutional power, this book reveals the overlooked aesthetic innovations of incarcerated people and the surprising literary roots of the U.S. prison system. Simon Rolston observes that the autobiographical work of incarcerated people is based on a conversion narrative, a story arc that underpins the concept of prison rehabilitation and that sometimes serves the interests of the prison system, rather than those on the inside. Yet many imprisoned people rework the conversion narrative the way they repurpose other objects in prison. Like a radio motor retooled into a tattoo gun, the conversion narrative has been redefined by some authors for subversive purposes, including questioning the ostensible emancipatory role of prison writing, critiquing white supremacy, and broadly reimagining autobiographical discourse. An interdisciplinary work that brings life writing scholarship into conversation with prison studies and law and literature studies, Prison Life Writing theorizes how life writing works in prison, explains literature’s complicated entanglements with institutional power, and demonstrates the political and aesthetic innovations of one of America’s most fascinating literary genres.

Working for Justice

Working for Justice PDF Author: Stephen John Hartnett
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252094964
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This collection documents the efforts of the Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education collective (PCARE) to put democracy into practice by merging prison education and activism. Through life-changing programs in a dozen states (Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin), PCARE works with prisoners, in prisons, and in communities to reclaim justice from the prison-industrial complex. Based on years of pragmatic activism and engaged teaching, the materials in this volume present a sweeping inventory of how communities and individuals both within and outside of prisons are marshaling the arts, education, and activism to reduce crime and enhance citizenship. Documenting hands-on case studies that emphasize educational initiatives, successful prison-based programs, and activist-oriented analysis, Working for Justice provides readers with real-world answers based on years of pragmatic activism and engaged teaching. Contributors are David Coogan, Craig Lee Engstrom, Jeralyn Faris, Stephen John Hartnett, Edward A. Hinck, Shelly Schaefer Hinck, Bryan J. McCann, Nikki H. Nichols, Eleanor Novek, Brittany L. Peterson, Jonathan Shailor, Rachel A. Smith, Derrick L. Williams, Lesley A. Withers, Jennifer K. Wood, and Bill Yousman.