True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall
by Mark Salzman
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Book Summary Information
Author: Mark SalzmanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-08-31
ISBN: 0375727612
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall
Book Review: Boys Will Be... Killers?
Summary: 5 Stars
I had zero expectations reading this book and it took me by storm. Partially for research on juvenile offenders and partially for philanthropic reasons, author Mark Salzman taught a writing class at a juvenile detention center in LA where most of the teenaged boys were awaiting trial for murder. What follows is in equal terms alarming, hilarious, and sad.
What's alarming: the reader gets to know these boys well and even sympathize with them, but the bottom line is that they are killers. In a few cases details about their crimes are provided. Are they deserving of our sympathies? Yes and no. Salzman seems aware of the pitfalls himself, providing perspective occasionally by offering asides about society's point of view (as well as the victims' points of view).
What's hilarious: the badinage between the boys. The profanity-laced ribbing they deliver at each other, typical of teenaged boys everywhere, is realistic and merciless. Every weakness is attacked; every mistake is magnified; and yet, they give each other his due when it comes to letting the defenses down to write about feelings.
What's sad: the fate of these boys. Almost all are convicted with the maximum sentences with little if any serious defense on the part of their appointed legal representatives. As you hear the stories of their misspent, abused, and neglected youths, you see that the picture is bigger and more complicated than you'd expect.
Keep your eye on Mr. Sills, a corrections officer who is hard as nails on the outside, but caring on the inside. He's one of those "sleeper" minor characters that can really make a book, and he offers the boys the tough, structured guidance that many of them lacked at home. I'm going to miss this book now that I'm done, but at least I have a bunch of other Mark Salzman titles to check out now. If you care about humanity, reading, writing, teaching, crime, rehabilitation, and overcrowded prisons, this is your book. And if you don't, this may well be your book anyway. Check it out.
Summary of True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall
In 1997 Mark Salzman, bestselling author Iron and Silk and Lying Awake, paid a reluctant visit to a writing class at L.A.?s Central Juvenile Hall, a lockup for violent teenage offenders, many of them charged with murder. What he found so moved and astonished him that he began to teach there regularly. In voices of indelible emotional presence, the boys write about what led them to crime and about the lives that stretch ahead of them behind bars. We see them coming to terms with their crime-ridden pasts and searching for a reason to believe in their future selves. Insightful, comic, honest and tragic, True Notebooks is an object lesson in the redemptive power of writing.Memoirs Books
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