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Vengeance
Zachary Lazar’s powerful and important novel was inspired by a passion play, The Life of Jesus Christ, he witnessed at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. As someone who writes “fiction, nonfiction, sometimes a hybrid of both,” the narrator of Vengeance, a character much like Lazar himself, tries to accurately view a world he knows is “beyond the limits of my small understanding.” In particular, he tries to unravel the truth behind the supposed crime of an inmate he meets and befriends, Kendrick King, who is serving a life sentence at Angola for murder.
As the narrator attempts to sort out what happened in King’s life―paying visits to his devoted mother, his estranged young daughter and her mother, his girlfriend, his brother, and his cousin―the writer’s own sense of identity begins to feel more and more like a fiction. He is one of the “free people” while Kendrick, who studies theology and philosophy, will never get his only wish, expressed plainly as “I just have to get out of here.” The dichotomy between their lives forces the narrator to confront the violence in his own past, and also to reexamine American notions of guilt and penance, racial bias, and the inherent perversity of punitive justice.
It is common knowledge that we have an incarceration crisis in our country. Vengeance, by way of vivid storytelling, helps us to understand the failure of empathy and imagination that causes it.
As the narrator attempts to sort out what happened in King’s life―paying visits to his devoted mother, his estranged young daughter and her mother, his girlfriend, his brother, and his cousin―the writer’s own sense of identity begins to feel more and more like a fiction. He is one of the “free people” while Kendrick, who studies theology and philosophy, will never get his only wish, expressed plainly as “I just have to get out of here.” The dichotomy between their lives forces the narrator to confront the violence in his own past, and also to reexamine American notions of guilt and penance, racial bias, and the inherent perversity of punitive justice.
It is common knowledge that we have an incarceration crisis in our country. Vengeance, by way of vivid storytelling, helps us to understand the failure of empathy and imagination that causes it.
272 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 13, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
February 4, 2018
Zach Lazar at his best, which is a truly high standard. Both an empathetic search for the truth of how one Angola inmate ended up incarcerated for life, and a meditation on the way reality and fiction twine with one another. Why is that we NEED to establish answers for our questions, and why is that even when we feel we know the truth, we remain shaken and uncertain of what we believe? Lazar's beautiful book is hybrid at its best--how much of what we believe to be true and believe to be possible depends on chance, on fate, and on luck. Highly recommend.
January 31, 2019
To me this book just rambled, and never really grabbed my attention. I expected more resolution from the investigation into the crime, but it went nowhere. For a far more compelling look into the injustice of our legal/prison system, I highly recommend Just Mercy.
June 30, 2020
Lazar has done something memoir writers should notice: written a novel about himself that doesn't need the "truth" as a crutch for a lack of craft. utterly mesmerizing and, with The Mars Room by Kushner, a necessity if one wants to understand the American prison industrial complex. masterful.
August 29, 2017
This book is so good, the story stays with you. And it's a really unusual novel in that it reads like gripping nonfiction at times.
July 4, 2019
An unsettling book that illustrates how black men end up in prison. In Kendrick King's case this came about because his friends lied to protect themselves. He is serving a life sentence at Angola, Louisiana, the state described as "the world's incarceration capital,"for allegedly murdering a friend. Zachary Lazar believed that because his own father was murdered he would gain insights into the inscrutable minds of murderers. The men he talks to at Angola do not seem to identify with him. How could they? They are at Angola because of crimes similar to that which happened to his father. Kendrick's mother works. Kendrick's wife works. His male friends seem to drift in and out of minimum wage jobs, earning enough for drugs, liquor or both. They are disconnected from a society that treats them harshly. This book left me feeling depressed and hopeless, though it is a valuable addition to the annals of incarceration, for-profit prisons and the seeming lack of discussion about these subjects in the population as a whole.
March 21, 2020
This "novel" defines a genre new to me, something like fictional true crime. It is the story of a writer who becomes interested in the case of a 22 year-old inmate serving a life sentence for murder in Angola. The prisoner seems likable and honest and claims he is innocent. The author half-believes him and looks up the case records. Ambiguities and irregularities abound.
Over the course of a couple of years, he interviews other people involved in the case, the prisoner's mother, a girlfriend, a cousin, and others. Nobody in law enforcement or the judiciary will talk to him. Throughout, the author reflects on the prisoner's hopeless situation. What is the prison system all about, really? Not rehabilitation, certainly. A life sentence wouldn't be that. Imprisonment is a kind of societal vengeance, he concludes. What if the young man really is innocent? I won't give away any spoiler because there isn't one.
The narrative is presented as a nonfiction case study, the first-person narrator telling you in detail about his investigation of the case. It's like a well-written true crime account of a complex case, except it's all made up. It's fictional crime reporting. There is no plot and no real story tension except the implicit question, "Is he innocent?"
The writing is pretty good in the beginning with some well-crafted sentences such as, "That word, redemption, strikes me as dubious now, a sign not exactly of bad faith but of something inside myself I don't trust." But the lyricism dissipates and the writing becomes tedious, pretentious, and repetitive. The author revels in irrelevant detail as if he were paid by the word, while he has tea with this interviewee and smokes a cigarette with that one. Maybe that's supposed to make the story seem more real somehow. It drove me nuts.
As for philosophical reflections on the justice system, I found them superficial, sentimental, and almost vapid. Yes, the system is corrupt and unfair. No, justice is not blind. Yes, people are complex, neither all good nor all bad. I had hoped for more insight from someone who had researched a case in such minute detail.
This might be a good book for high school students or younger readers who probably would gain some insight into the criminal justice system. It's well-written, thoughtful, detailed, and accessible. And it's interesting for its hybrid fictional-nonfiction format.
Lazar, Zachary (2018). Vengeance. New York: Catapult, 251pp.
Over the course of a couple of years, he interviews other people involved in the case, the prisoner's mother, a girlfriend, a cousin, and others. Nobody in law enforcement or the judiciary will talk to him. Throughout, the author reflects on the prisoner's hopeless situation. What is the prison system all about, really? Not rehabilitation, certainly. A life sentence wouldn't be that. Imprisonment is a kind of societal vengeance, he concludes. What if the young man really is innocent? I won't give away any spoiler because there isn't one.
The narrative is presented as a nonfiction case study, the first-person narrator telling you in detail about his investigation of the case. It's like a well-written true crime account of a complex case, except it's all made up. It's fictional crime reporting. There is no plot and no real story tension except the implicit question, "Is he innocent?"
The writing is pretty good in the beginning with some well-crafted sentences such as, "That word, redemption, strikes me as dubious now, a sign not exactly of bad faith but of something inside myself I don't trust." But the lyricism dissipates and the writing becomes tedious, pretentious, and repetitive. The author revels in irrelevant detail as if he were paid by the word, while he has tea with this interviewee and smokes a cigarette with that one. Maybe that's supposed to make the story seem more real somehow. It drove me nuts.
As for philosophical reflections on the justice system, I found them superficial, sentimental, and almost vapid. Yes, the system is corrupt and unfair. No, justice is not blind. Yes, people are complex, neither all good nor all bad. I had hoped for more insight from someone who had researched a case in such minute detail.
This might be a good book for high school students or younger readers who probably would gain some insight into the criminal justice system. It's well-written, thoughtful, detailed, and accessible. And it's interesting for its hybrid fictional-nonfiction format.
Lazar, Zachary (2018). Vengeance. New York: Catapult, 251pp.
March 19, 2018
The characters and the narrator seem unique, yet immediately familiar, perhaps because they are, with maybe a few facts and names changed, actually from real life. The novel reads like a personal narrative of a writer trying to get to the truth, almost if Sarah Koenig had written "Serial" instead of making a podcast. (And lo and behold, a quote from Koenig is on the back cover - although I hadn't noticed until the end.) The writing has an eerie, dreamlike quality to it. All of the scenes succeed at establishing a mood. But yet, I don't know if I was truly moved, the whole thing perhaps just too meta. The compelling scenes of broken American lives can't make up for the lack of an explicit plot. There's never a dramatic tension that the narrator is about to discover something, only to be disappointed. And unlike "Serial", the narrator never stops to say "here's what we know, here's what we don't" which ultimately diminishes our understanding of his sense of injustice that compels him forward, at least professionally. This contrasts with the very explicit acknowledgement the narrator is personally compelled to investigate Kendrick as some way of reckoning with his father's murder. This theme might have worked better (in all its ambivalence - is Kendrick the father or is Kendrick the man who killed him?) if left for the reader to discern. There are works of both fiction and non-fiction that do a better job of indicting the American criminal justice system and showing how it is a fractured mirror of modern society.
January 22, 2018
I wish that Goodreads had a 3.5 star option, because despite the fact that this book started out slow for me, it really gained momentum in the second half. Calling largely upon Lazar's own experiences, this novel explores the ways that the ideas of what is true or false, innocent or guilty, and real or unreal are blurred the more complicated a person becomes. The protagonist meets a man sentenced to life in prison in Louisiana for a crime he adamantly proclaims he did not commit, but rather than this novel calling upon all of the conventions of, say, a mystery novel, it focuses in on the human aspect of crime and the prison system. While I do not necessarily think the prose is particularly skillful--though it does have some moments of truly great writing, especially at its emotional peaks--the plot itself is captivating in an altogether different way than most crime novels. This novel doesn't ask you to solve a crime, or even develop a definitive statement on whodunit. Lazar's novel asks you to look at one man and the way judicial and prison systems affect others in very real ways. Rather than coming to a conclusion, it leaves you asking more questions. And this is its purpose, I think: it doesn't want you to walk away self-assured, comfortable with your knowledge of the crime and who you believe did or didn't do it; it wants you to focus on the questions and why, exactly, some of them just can't be answered.
July 10, 2024
Describing an hour spent in a sense-deprivation tank, Zachary Lazar writes: “I don’t want to make it sound more meaningful than it was.” That statement could be taken as Lazar’s mantra as a writer. VENGEANCE, which he presents as a novel although it seems more a journalistic record of personal experience and reflection, is distinguished throughout by the author’s rigorous determination not to exceed the inescapable limitations of his understanding, as well as the sometimes extreme difficulty of the proverbial “putting oneself in another’s shoes.”
The narrator tries to unravel the circumstances, including innocence or guilt, of an inmate serving a life sentence in a Louisiana prison (in a country that incarcerates more of its population than any other country on earth) for the crime of murder.
VENGEANCE provides more questions than answers. It does not offer the easy comfort of something like an episode of LAW AND ORDER on TV , but we may come out of this challenging book with something better: renewed or heightened awareness of the limitations of our own understanding.
The narrator tries to unravel the circumstances, including innocence or guilt, of an inmate serving a life sentence in a Louisiana prison (in a country that incarcerates more of its population than any other country on earth) for the crime of murder.
VENGEANCE provides more questions than answers. It does not offer the easy comfort of something like an episode of LAW AND ORDER on TV , but we may come out of this challenging book with something better: renewed or heightened awareness of the limitations of our own understanding.
August 16, 2019
This book is a very good interpretation of the problems of our justice system. However, I don’t think he really did those problems justice. What I could say I learned from the book is that the system is unfair, but I kind of already knew that. I do like his inner struggle of what truly makes someone innocent or guilty in the eyes of the law vs in the eyes of people. Additionally, he also does a very good job at toying with the line between fiction and reality. He started to lose my interest, however, because he repeated himself constantly to the point where it almost felt like he was trying too hard to be deep. My last problem was that I felt like he made the narrative too much about himself and not about who the story was actually about. He talked so much about being a voyeur; in my opinion that repeated comment was simply wasted pages that could’ve been spent on deepening King’s narrative. Overall it was a good book, but often it just felt like a white man trying too hard to relate to the absurd amount of black people who have been unfairly incarcerated.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 18, 2018
The narrator, a journalist, forms a relationship with a man serving life in prison for murder. As is often the case in the real world, but less often in fiction, the guilt of the convicted murder is ambiguous and the murder, if it occurred, was pointless.
The plot was meandering and ruminative, more about changes in the narrator's knowledge and opinion than about events, and I found the openness of the prison and the freedom of visitors and prisoners to mingle implausible. But the crime itself, the humanity of the convicted criminal, and the narrator's investigation and reaction, are credible and realistic.
The plot was meandering and ruminative, more about changes in the narrator's knowledge and opinion than about events, and I found the openness of the prison and the freedom of visitors and prisoners to mingle implausible. But the crime itself, the humanity of the convicted criminal, and the narrator's investigation and reaction, are credible and realistic.
December 10, 2018
“What I seem to resist is the idea that the real and the imaginary don’t bleed into each other.”
*
A fitting quote for a book with a protagonist that closely resembles the author.... This novel’s a close and disturbing look at the justice system in Louisiana, told through the voice of a writer who develops a tenuous friendship with an inmate sentenced to life. Who is telling the truth? Who can be trusted? Is there redemption in this world? Hope? Justice? A heavy and moving book that makes you think.
*
A fitting quote for a book with a protagonist that closely resembles the author.... This novel’s a close and disturbing look at the justice system in Louisiana, told through the voice of a writer who develops a tenuous friendship with an inmate sentenced to life. Who is telling the truth? Who can be trusted? Is there redemption in this world? Hope? Justice? A heavy and moving book that makes you think.
November 3, 2018
parts of this were amazing, other parts not so much... hard to categorize and/or pin down to a type of read... in places it came across as overly self-indulgent, but other times it was poignant and reflective and poetic... truths fact, lies, fantasies, reconstructions, misrememberings, twists... unsatisfying ending, but i was left with the impression that was partly the point of the writing itself... expectations not quite met, but still a worthy tale to wind your way through...
October 11, 2020
Is this really fiction? It doesn't feel like it. I think it is fiction in the sense that when a story is committed to paper, it stops being true and living, and devolves into just a story, told for a purpose and so leaving out parts, with some things imagined or extrapolated, and always from the writer's point of view.
It has a lot to say and to show, about privilege, about justice, about families, about institionalized vengeance. It ain't pretty. But even if fiction, it is true.
It has a lot to say and to show, about privilege, about justice, about families, about institionalized vengeance. It ain't pretty. But even if fiction, it is true.
August 1, 2024
I simply... Confused. Bewildered. Saddened by the state of things. This book reminded me of that painting of Thomas Jefferson that looks cut from the canvas and is draped like falling fabric to reveal that behind it hangs a similarly styled painting of Sally Hemings, a slave that he abused and bore children with (Behind the Myth of Benevolence, Titus Kaphar). Something about tearing away whiteness to see all the rubble that this privilege leaves in its wake.
March 12, 2018
Reading this for work, I started out feeling a little ambivalent about this — to my lasting shame, normally I resist "issues" novels — but I ended up really liking it. In particular, the prose throughout is genuinely great.
There are some questions I have about what's presented here, but fortunately I'll be able to ask the author myself!
There are some questions I have about what's presented here, but fortunately I'll be able to ask the author myself!
April 1, 2018
Lots of personal interest in this and aware of what's fiction and not, who are real characters. Glad to see Gary Taylor in there, wish I could have seen Kenya as well. The book is headed their way in any case and sure to stimulate much discussion. Will now try I PITY THE POOR IMMIGRANT. Interesting writer.
September 11, 2018
Lazar (the character) is visiting a prison where an inmate tells him he's innocent. Lazar looks into the case some more, interviewing the others involved and as he does, he changes his mind about who may have committed the crime. In the process, he learns more about life on the wrong side of the tracks, and how a relatively simple matter of innocence or guilt can in fact be a complicated story.
October 8, 2018
With a dreamy, detached quality, the author tells a story of a prison inmate and the systems in place that brought and kept him there. Always the same grim and pointless outrage but this book makes it hard to connect to any of the players. In the end, it’s another harsh statement about our culture of incarceration and the hopelessness at work in the lives of the victims of this system.
March 13, 2019
A big part of the appeal to me personally was the setting in New Orleans, the connection to Angola, and the fact that the author is a professor at Tulane University. The basic plot pertains to circumstances that, I fear, are far too common. But the book left me unsettled, as if there was no real resolution in the plot.
July 25, 2021
In a prison in Angola, Louisiana, Zachary Lazar gets to know Kendrick King, one of the prisoners there serving a life sentence for killing a guy while maintaing not to have killed him.
Zachary Lazar goes to great lengths to check out the background stories only to come up empty-handed.
Interesting read! I would have preferred the book to be 180 pages long instead of 250, though.
Zachary Lazar goes to great lengths to check out the background stories only to come up empty-handed.
Interesting read! I would have preferred the book to be 180 pages long instead of 250, though.
November 27, 2017
A tale so true and raw, that you'll swear that it is non-fiction.....rich in detail, elegant in its telling, the story that unfolds will have you reminding yourself "This is fiction" on repeat. One of the most daring and important true-to-life tale to be imagined.
December 10, 2017
This is a quiet exploration of a man serving life in prison and the writer who examines it with him. The setting and the storytelling is so effortless and it just flows. Everything feels real and you get sucked in the story. Well done.
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Review copy provided by the publisher.
March 18, 2018
Captures the weird uncertainty, sorry, pointless waste of it all and the self-doubt.
Read
September 11, 2019bit hard to follow but willing to try this author again with previous book with same story line
Read
January 31, 2020Did not finish. Just could not get into it.
July 25, 2018
Great stuff:
My review, for ZYZZYVA magazine, is linked below:
http://www.zyzzyva.org/2018/07/19/see...
(Full text follows):
Seeing Anything Clearly in This Time and Place: Zachary Lazar’s ‘Vengeance’
by Paul Wilner
Posted on July 19, 2018
Vengeance_cvr_72dpi_web_res_grandePublished earlier this year to respectful notices, Zachary Lazar’s painstakingly crafted novel Vengeance (272 pages; Catapult) takes on the complicated issues of race, the socially constructed questions of guilt or innocence in late stage capitalism, cultural appropriation and redemption. “What ‘Vengeance’ really attempts to unravel is the problem of injustice, although it is not a protest novel,’’ Katy Waldman noted in The New Yorker. Prison reform has been in the air—just ask Kim Kardashian—but news cycles come and go. Regardless, Vengeance merits a more sustained look.
The novel was inspired by the author’s visit to Angola, a Louisiana State Penitentiary (and former slave plantation) where he saw a production of a Passion Play, “The Life of Jesus Christ.” With a friend named Deborah (in real-life, photographer Deborah Luster, whose series “Tooth for an Eye: A Choreography of Violence in Orleans Parish’’ is credited at the end of the book), Lazar’s narrator (and thinly veiled stand-in) attends the rehearsals and ultimate final performance.
More importantly, he befriends a prisoner named Kendrick King, doing life for his alleged role in a drug deal gone murderously wrong. Did he, in fact, do the deed? Or was he paying dues, proudly standing up for his cousin, Mason, who, the narrator finds out through dogged reporting, was most likely the one who was directly involved. But does it matter, ultimately?
Kendrick adopts the fatalism of his fellow inmates, one of whom is quoted early on: “Imagine you’re trapped in a barn…Now imagine that the barn is on fire. You will do anything you can to get out of that barn. You will do anything you have to to get out of that barn.”
King is steadfast in his self-immolation, even as the narrator does everything in his power to find out the truth: interviewing Kendrick’s family, ex-girlfriend, and daughter, and consulting police records in the course of his impossible mission.
It’s familiar territory for Lazar, who is inexorably drawn to the dark side. He previously chronicled his father’s death, in a contract killing, in the nonfiction work Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder. And in Sway he fictionally retold the connections among the Rolling Stones’s Brian Jones, dead in a swimming pool, the heavy waters at the ill-fated Altamont concert, and Bobby Beausoleil, an outlier of the Manson Family who was also involved with underground film chronicler Kenneth Anger.
Lazar’s prose is that of the slow blues, as in this description of a New Orleans blues joint:
“It was late, a different weeknight, but the bar was close to home, nearly empty, and we liked to go there for the music. The singer had a voice that might have made him famous fifty years ago. He was a little paunchy now, graying, flourishing a white handkerchief he sometimes used to dab his forehead, singing a song about surviving, enduring. The drummer stayed just behind the beat so that the slow song had kick, the guitar player melting little country-and-western riffs into soul. It sounded like it was 1970 and instead of seven of us in the bar who knew some of the words it was a theater and there were many more of us. The world outside was on fire, it always was, and though the singer didn’t sing about any of that he alluded to it in the timbre of his voice. He sang about coming home to New Orleans – parochial, poor, beautiful, inescapable – and the part of the song that was celebratory was not false and the part that was sad was not weak.”
There’s more than this—much more—in this angry, meditative book, too much to do it justice here.
Lazar describes the Passion Play and Pilate’s unsuccessful remonstrance (“Behold the man. The sight of his battered and bleeding body will surely satisfy your craving for revenge’’) in measured, mounting detail. Flannery O’Connor is here, surely, as is Richard Wright.
“The crow wished everything was black, the owl that everything was white,’’ he writes, quoting William Blake. “He wasn’t talking about race. I’m not talking about race. I’m talking about seeing anything clearly in the time and place in which we live.”
My review, for ZYZZYVA magazine, is linked below:
http://www.zyzzyva.org/2018/07/19/see...
(Full text follows):
Seeing Anything Clearly in This Time and Place: Zachary Lazar’s ‘Vengeance’
by Paul Wilner
Posted on July 19, 2018
Vengeance_cvr_72dpi_web_res_grandePublished earlier this year to respectful notices, Zachary Lazar’s painstakingly crafted novel Vengeance (272 pages; Catapult) takes on the complicated issues of race, the socially constructed questions of guilt or innocence in late stage capitalism, cultural appropriation and redemption. “What ‘Vengeance’ really attempts to unravel is the problem of injustice, although it is not a protest novel,’’ Katy Waldman noted in The New Yorker. Prison reform has been in the air—just ask Kim Kardashian—but news cycles come and go. Regardless, Vengeance merits a more sustained look.
The novel was inspired by the author’s visit to Angola, a Louisiana State Penitentiary (and former slave plantation) where he saw a production of a Passion Play, “The Life of Jesus Christ.” With a friend named Deborah (in real-life, photographer Deborah Luster, whose series “Tooth for an Eye: A Choreography of Violence in Orleans Parish’’ is credited at the end of the book), Lazar’s narrator (and thinly veiled stand-in) attends the rehearsals and ultimate final performance.
More importantly, he befriends a prisoner named Kendrick King, doing life for his alleged role in a drug deal gone murderously wrong. Did he, in fact, do the deed? Or was he paying dues, proudly standing up for his cousin, Mason, who, the narrator finds out through dogged reporting, was most likely the one who was directly involved. But does it matter, ultimately?
Kendrick adopts the fatalism of his fellow inmates, one of whom is quoted early on: “Imagine you’re trapped in a barn…Now imagine that the barn is on fire. You will do anything you can to get out of that barn. You will do anything you have to to get out of that barn.”
King is steadfast in his self-immolation, even as the narrator does everything in his power to find out the truth: interviewing Kendrick’s family, ex-girlfriend, and daughter, and consulting police records in the course of his impossible mission.
It’s familiar territory for Lazar, who is inexorably drawn to the dark side. He previously chronicled his father’s death, in a contract killing, in the nonfiction work Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder. And in Sway he fictionally retold the connections among the Rolling Stones’s Brian Jones, dead in a swimming pool, the heavy waters at the ill-fated Altamont concert, and Bobby Beausoleil, an outlier of the Manson Family who was also involved with underground film chronicler Kenneth Anger.
Lazar’s prose is that of the slow blues, as in this description of a New Orleans blues joint:
“It was late, a different weeknight, but the bar was close to home, nearly empty, and we liked to go there for the music. The singer had a voice that might have made him famous fifty years ago. He was a little paunchy now, graying, flourishing a white handkerchief he sometimes used to dab his forehead, singing a song about surviving, enduring. The drummer stayed just behind the beat so that the slow song had kick, the guitar player melting little country-and-western riffs into soul. It sounded like it was 1970 and instead of seven of us in the bar who knew some of the words it was a theater and there were many more of us. The world outside was on fire, it always was, and though the singer didn’t sing about any of that he alluded to it in the timbre of his voice. He sang about coming home to New Orleans – parochial, poor, beautiful, inescapable – and the part of the song that was celebratory was not false and the part that was sad was not weak.”
There’s more than this—much more—in this angry, meditative book, too much to do it justice here.
Lazar describes the Passion Play and Pilate’s unsuccessful remonstrance (“Behold the man. The sight of his battered and bleeding body will surely satisfy your craving for revenge’’) in measured, mounting detail. Flannery O’Connor is here, surely, as is Richard Wright.
“The crow wished everything was black, the owl that everything was white,’’ he writes, quoting William Blake. “He wasn’t talking about race. I’m not talking about race. I’m talking about seeing anything clearly in the time and place in which we live.”
May 15, 2021
Sloughed through it... it felt really mixed up, going from what was happening with Kendrick to the author's emotional reactions to them in the context of his father's murder. Such that I'm still not 100% clear what happened. But maybe that was the intention.
Either way, the main message is clear. We have a tendency to assign narratives to events, to explain things in retrospect in a way that makes sense to us. But this is a fallacy, because we cannot know the 'real' past.
Either way, the main message is clear. We have a tendency to assign narratives to events, to explain things in retrospect in a way that makes sense to us. But this is a fallacy, because we cannot know the 'real' past.
December 29, 2018
A reporter tries to understand the lifetime prison sentence of one individual.
Read
October 18, 2018I loved this book! it was heart-breaking to read this book about this young man. What are we doing to our young people? it felt as if I was taking a tour of the prison. I kept crying, had to put it down at times.
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