Author: Hwang Sok-yong Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1839760834 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 625
Book Description
A sweeping account of imprisonment--in time, in language, and in a divided country--from Korea's most acclaimed novelist In 1993, writer and democracy activist Hwang Sok-yong was sentenced to five years in the Seoul Detention Center upon his return to South Korea from North Korea, the country he had fled with his family as a child at the start of the Korean War. Already a dissident writer well-known for his part in the democracy movement of the 1980s, Hwang's imprisonment forced him to consider the many prisons to which he was subject--of thought, of writing, of Cold War nations, of the heart. In this capacious memoir, Hwang moves between his imprisonment and his life--as a boy in Pyongyang, as a young activist protesting South Korea's military dictatorships, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, as a dissident writer first traveling abroad--and in so doing, narrates the dramatic revolutions and transformations of one life and of Korean society during the twentieth century.
Author: Diane Schoemperlen Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 1443434221 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
From the Governor General’s Award winning author of Forms of Devotion, Our Lady of the Lost and Found and By the Book “Never once in my life had I dreamed of being in bed with a convicted killer.” For almost six turbulent years, award-winning writer Diane Schoemperlen was involved with a prison inmate serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. The relationship surprised no one more than her. How do you fall in love with a man with a violent past? How do you date someone who is in prison? This Is Not My Life is the story of the romance between Diane and Shane—how they met and fell in love, how they navigated passes and parole and the obstacles facing a long-term prisoner attempting to return to society, and how, eventually, things fell apart. While no relationship takes place in a vacuum, this is never more true than when that relationship is with a federal inmate. In this candid, often wry, sometimes disturbing memoir, Schoemperlen takes us inside this complex and difficult relationship as she journeys through the prison system with Shane. Not only did this relationship enlarge her capacity for both empathy and compassion, but it also forced her to more deeply examine herself.
Author: Nawāl Saʻdāwī Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 9780520088887 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 220
Book Description
"If Kafka had been a feminist, his prisoner might have had Nawal el Sa'adawi's feistiness, maybe, like her, he would have hoed a prison garden, led veiled and unveiled cellmates in rebellious calisthenics, strategized with a murderess to foil state illogic. This book gives me hope, even makes me laugh."—Cynthia Enloe, author of The Morning After
Author: Kaneko Fumiko Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134901763 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
Kaneko Fumiko (1903-1926) wrote this memoir while in prison after being convicted of plotting to assassinate the Japanese emperor. Despite an early life of misery, deprivation, and hardship, she grew up to be a strong and independent young woman. When she moved to Tokyo in 1920, she gravitated to left-wing groups and eventually joined with the Korean nihilist Pak Yeol to form a two-person nihilist organization. Two days after the Great Tokyo Earthquake, in a general wave of anti-leftist and anti-Korean hysteria, the authorities arrested the pair and charged them with high treason. Defiant to the end (she hanged herself in prison on July 23, 1926), Kaneko Fumiko wrote this memoir as an indictment of the society that oppressed her, the family that abused and neglected her, and the imperial system that drove her to her death.
Author: Mikhail Khodorkovsky Publisher: ABRAMS ISBN: 1468311611 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 60
Book Description
The Russian oil mogul and activist offers reflections on his decades-long incarceration under Putin in this “illuminating and brave” prison memoir (The Washington Post). Mikhail Khodorkovsky was Russia’s most successful businessman—and an outspoken critic of the Kremlin. As his oil company Yukos revived the Russian oil industry, Khodorkovsky began sponsoring programs to encourage civil society and fight corruption. Then he was arrested at gunpoint. Sentenced to ten years in a Siberian penal colony on fraud and tax evasion charges in 2003, Khodorkovsky was put on trial again in 2010 and sentenced to fourteen years on new charges that contradicted the previous ones. While imprisoned, Khodorkovsky fought for the rights of his fellow prisoners, going on hunger strike four times. After he was pardoned in 2013, he vowed to continue fighting for prisoners’ rights, and this book is dedicated to that work. A moving portrait of the prisoners Khodorkovsky met, My Fellow Prisoners is an eye-opening account of Russia’s brutal prison system. “Vivid, humane and poignant” —Financial Times
Author: Sarah J. Young Publisher: UCL Press ISBN: 1787359913 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
In 1884, the first of 68 prisoners convicted of terrorism and revolutionary activity were transferred to a new maximum security prison at Shlissel´burg Fortress near St Petersburg. The regime of indeterminate sentences in isolation caused severe mental and physical deterioration among the prisoners, over half of whom died. But the survivors fought back to reform the prison and improve the inmates’ living conditions. The memoirs many survivors wrote enshrined their story in revolutionary mythology, and acted as an indictment of the Tsarist autocracy’s loss of moral authority. Writing Resistance features three of these memoirs, all translated into English for the first time. They show the process of transforming the regime as a collaborative endeavour that resulted in flourishing allotments, workshops and intellectual culture – and in the inmates running many of the prison’s everyday functions. Sarah J. Young’s introductory essay analyses the Shlissel´burg memoirs’ construction of a collective narrative of resilience, resistance and renewal. It uses distant reading techniques to explore the communal values they inscribe, their adoption of a powerful group identity, and emphasis on overcoming the physical and psychological barriers of the prison. The first extended study of Shlissel´burg’s revolutionary inmates in English, Writing Resistance uncovers an episode in the history of political imprisonment that bears comparison with the inmates of Robben Island in South Africa’s apartheid regime and the Maze Prison in Belfast during the Troubles. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the Russian revolution, carceral history, penal practice and behaviours, and prison and life writing.
Author: Ann Walmsley Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 014319416X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
A daring journalist goes behind bars to explore the redemptive power of books with bikers, bank robbers, and gunmen. An attack in London left Ann Walmsley unable to walk alone down the street, and shook her belief in the fundamental goodness of people. A few years later, when a friend asked her to participate in a bold new venture in a men's medium security prison, Ann had to weigh her curiosity and desire to be of service against her anxiety and fear. But she signed on, and for eighteen months went to a remote building at Collins Bay, meeting a group of heavily tattooed book club members without the presence of guards or security cameras. There was no wine and cheese, no plush furnishings. But a book club on the inside proved to be a place to share ideas and regain a sense of humanity. From The Grapes of Wrath to The Cellist of Sarajevo, Outliers to Infidel, the book discussions became a springboard for frank conversations about loss, anger, redemption, and loneliness. The books changed the men and the men changed Walmsley. Written with compassion and humour, The Prison Book Club is an eye-opening look at inmates and the penal system, and the possibilities of redemption.
Author: Hwang Sok-yong
Author: Diane Schoemperlen
Author: Alexander Berkman
Author: Nawāl Saʻdāwī
Author: Kaneko Fumiko
Author: Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Author: Sarah J. Young
Author: Bo-Won Keum
Author: Charles Andrews
Author: Ann Walmsley