Download or read book Monkey House Blues written by Dominic Stevenson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-03-04 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1993, Dominic Stevenson left a comfortable life with his girlfriend in Kyoto, Japan, to travel to China. His journey took him to some of the most inhospitable and dangerous places in the world, from the poppy fields of the Afghan-Pakistan border to the ancient trade routes of the Silk Road, before he was arrested for drug smuggling while boarding a boat from Shanghai to Japan. After eight months on remand in a Chinese police lock-up, Stevenson was sentenced to two and a half years in one of the biggest prisons in the world, the Shanghai Municipal Prison aka 'The Monkey House'. There, he was imprisoned alongside just five westerners amongst five thousand Chinese criminals in a block for death row inmates and political prisoners, where the guards drank green tea and let the prison run itself. The experience led him to reflect on his previous life in Japan, India and Thailand, during which time he took on a varied array of jobs, including English teacher, karaoke-bar host, factory worker, busker, crystal seller and dope smuggler. From Afghan gun shops to Tibetan monasteries, Thai brothels and the stirrings of the rave culture in Goa, Monkey House Blues is a tale of discovery and rediscovery, of friendship and betrayal.
Download or read book Jail House Blues written by Bruce L. Danto and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Meet Me with Your Black Drawers On written by Jeannie Cheatham and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeannie Cheatham is a living legend in jazz and blues. A pianist, singer, songwriter, and co-leader of the Sweet Baby Blues Band, she has played and sung with many of the greats in blues and jazz—T-Bone Walker, Dinah Washington, Cab Callaway, Joe Williams, Al Hibbler, Odetta, and Jimmy Witherspoon. Cheatham toured with Big Mama Thornton off and on for ten years and was featured with Thornton and Sippie Wallace in the award-winning PBS documentary Three Generations of the Blues. Her music, which has garnered national and international acclaim, has been described as unrestrained, exuberant, soulful, rollicking, wicked, virtuous, wild, and truthful. Cheatham's signature song, "Meet Me with Your Black Drawers On" is a staple in jazz and blues clubs across America and in Europe, Africa, and Japan. In this delightfully frank autobiography, Jeannie Cheatham recalls a life that has been as exuberant, virtuous, wild, and truthful as her music. She begins in Akron, Ohio, where she grew up in a vibrant multiethnic neighborhood surrounded by a family of strong women. From those roots, she launched a musical career that took her from the Midwest to California, doing time along the way everywhere from a jail cell in Dayton, Ohio, where she was innocently caught in a police raid, to the University of Wisconsin-Madison—where she and Jimmy Cheatham taught music. Cheatham writes of a life spent fighting racism and sexism, of rage and resolve, misery and miracles, betrayals and triumphs, of faith almost lost in dark places, but mysteriously regained in a flash of light. Cheatham's autobiography is also the story of her fifty-years-and-counting love affair and musical collaboration with her husband and band partner, Jimmy Cheatham.
Download or read book Mother California written by Kenneth E. Hartman and published by Atlas and Company. This book was released on 2010-09-27 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A magnificent inquiry into the human condition."—Publishers Weekly, starred review Thirty years ago, when Kenneth Hartman was nineteen, he murdered a homeless man in a Los Angeles park. Sentenced to life without parole, Hartman gradually evolved into a devoted husband, father, and prison reform activist. Mother California offers definite proof that there is no such thing as a life beyond redemption.
Download or read book Hard Time Blues written by Sasha Abramsky and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In September 1996, fifty-three year old heroin addict Billy Ochoa was sentenced to 326 years in prison. His crime: committing $2100 worth of welfare fraud. Ochoa was sent to New Folsom supermax prison, joining thousands of other men who will spend the rest of their lives in California's teeming correctional facilities as a result of that state's tough Three Strikes law. His incarceration will cost over $20,000 a year until he dies. Hard Time Blues weaves together the story of the growth of the American prison system over the past quarter century primarily through the story of Ochoa, a career criminal who grew up in the barrios of post-World War II L.A. Ochoa, who had a long history of non-violent crimes committed to fund his drug habit, who cycled in and out of prison since the late 1960's, is a perfect example of how perennial misfits, rather than blood-soaked violent criminals, make up the majority of America's prisoners. This is also the story of the burgeoning careers of politicians such as former California Governor Pete Wilson, who rose to power on the "crime issue." Wilson, whose grandfather was a cop murdered by drug-runners in early twentieth century Chicago, scored a stunning come-from-behind re-election victory in 1994. In so doing, he came to epitomize the 1990s tough-on-crime politician. Award-winning journalist Sasha Abramsky uses immersion reportage to bring alive the political forces that have led America's prison and jail population to increase more than four fold in the past twenty years. Through the stories of Ochoa, Wilson, and others, he explores in devastating detail how the public has been manipulated into supporting mass incarceration during a period when crime rates have been steadily falling. Hard Time Blues deftly explores the War on Drugs, the Rockefeller Laws, the growth of the SuperMax Prisons, the climate of fear that led to laws such as Truth-in-Sentencing, and how the stunning repercussions of imprisoning two million citizens affect all of America. In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground and Melissa Fay Greene's The Temple Bombing, Abramsky explores this new and dangerous fault-line in American society in a dramatic and compelling manner. From the opening courtroom scene through the final images behind the electrified fences of the nation's toughest, meanest prisons, Abramsky paints a grimly intimate portrait of the players and personalities behind this societal earthquake. Hard Time Blues combines a sense of history with a powerful narrative, to tell a story about issues and people that leads us to understand how The Land of the Free has become the world's largest prison nation.
Download or read book Lightnin Hopkins written by Alan Govenar and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2010-05 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on scores of interviews with the artist's relatives, friends, lovers, producers, accompanists, managers, and fans, this brilliant biography reveals a man of many layers and contradictions. Following the journey of a musician who left his family's poor cotton farm at age eight carrying only a guitar, the book chronicles his life on the open road playing blues music and doing odd jobs. It debunks the myths surrounding his meetings with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Texas Alexander, his time on a chain gang, his relationships with women, and his lifelong appetite for gambling and drinking. This volume also discusses his hard-to-read personality; whether playing for black audiences in Houston's Third Ward, for white crowds at the Matrix in San Francisco, or in the concert halls of Europe, Sam Hopkins was a musician who poured out his feelings in his songs and knew how to endear himself to his audience--yet it was hard to tell if he was truly sincere, and he appeared to trust no one. Finally, this book moves beyond exploring his personal life and details his entire musical career, from his first recording session in 1946--when he was dubbed Lightnin'--to his appearance on the national charts and his rediscovery by Mack McCormick and Sam Charters in 1959, when his popularity had begun to wane and a second career emerged, playing to white audiences rather than black ones. Overall, this narrative tells the story of an important blues musician who became immensely successful by singing with a searing emotive power about his country roots and the injustices that informed the civil rights era.
Download or read book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism written by Angela Y. Davis and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture. The works of Rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics. Overlooked, Davis shows, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith−published here in their entirety for the first time−Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.
Download or read book A Killing in Amish Country written by Gregg Olsen and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2016-07-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At just 30 years old, with dark-blonde hair and freckles, Barbara Weaver was as pretty as the women depicted on the covers of her favorite "bonnet" stories - romance novels set in Amish America. Barbara had everything she'd ever wanted: five beautiful children, a home, her faith, and a husband named Eli. But while Barbara was happy to live as the Amish have for centuries - without modern conveniences, Eli was tempted by technology: cell phones, the Internet, and sexting. Online he called himself "Amish Stud" and found no shortage of "English" women looking for love and sex. Twice he left Barbara and their children, was shunned, begged for forgiveness, and had been welcomed back to the church. Barb Raber was raised Amish, but is now a Conservative Mennonite. She drove Eli to appointments in her car, and she gave him what he wanted when he wanted: a cell phone, a laptop, rides to his favorite fishing and hunting places, and, most importantly, sex. When Eli starts asking people to kill his wife for him, Barb offers to help. One night, just after Eli had hitched a ride with a group of men to go fishing in the hours before dawn, Barb Raber entered the Weaver house and shot Barbara Weaver in the chest at close range. It was only the third murder in hundreds of years of Amish life in America, and it fell to Edna Boyle, a young assistant prosecutor to seek justice for Barbara Weaver.
Download or read book Poems and Songs All Equally Well Done written by Jean Torrens and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2010-06-25 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jean Torrens, born in 1923, has been writing poems for most of her life.Since her first poem, written while she was stationed in St. David's in Wales serving for the WRAF, she has continued to write poems that reflect the world as she has experienced it.These poems document her early years in Landmore, Co. Londonderry, where her family lost their loving mother and throughout her adult life where faith has played an increasingly important guiding role.Here you will find poems that reflect the joy, sadness, Love and challenges that we can all experience in our lives.With faith in our Lord, there can be no fear of darkness in our lives, for we are never alone with the light of Jesus guiding the way.
Download or read book Mental Health Services in Local Jails written by Henry J. Steadman and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Where the Money Was written by Willie Sutton and published by Crown. This book was released on 2004-03-23 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Broadway Books Library of Larceny Luc Sante, General Editor For more than fifty years, Willie Sutton devoted his boundless energy and undoubted genius exclusively to two activities at which he became better than any man in history: breaking in and breaking out. The targets in the first instance were banks and in the second, prisons. Unarguably America’s most famous bank robber, Willie never injured a soul, but took on almost a hundred banks and departed three of America’s most escape-proof penitentiaries. This is the stuff of myth—rascally and cautionary by turns—yet true in every searing, diverting, and brilliantly recalled detail.
Download or read book Time in the Blues written by Julia Simon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immediate and spontaneous, the blues focuses on the present moment, creating an experience of time for performer and listener. 'Time in the Blues' offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the forms of temporality produced by and reflected in the blues within the historical context of Jim Crow segregation, sharecropping, racist violence, and migration.
Download or read book Kensington Blues written by and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Upside Your Head written by Johnny Otis and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 1993-11-19 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intriguing memoir by the legendary bandleader.
Download or read book Behind Bars written by Jeffrey Ian Ross and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best ways to avoid being beaten, sexually abused, or getting killed; US origin.
Download or read book No Mercy Here written by Sarah Haley and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imprisoned black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economic exploitation. Subjugated as convict laborers and forced to serve additional time as domestic workers before they were allowed their freedom, black women faced a pitiless system of violence, terror, and debasement. Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley uncovers imprisoned women's brutalization in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also illuminating the prisoners' acts of resistance and sabotage, challenging ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy and offering alternative conceptions of social and political life. A landmark history of black women's imprisonment in the South, this book recovers stories of the captivity and punishment of black women to demonstrate how the system of incarceration was crucial to organizing the logics of gender and race, and constructing Jim Crow modernity.
Download or read book Men in Crisis written by Hans Toch and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2007 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about human breakdown under stress. It is the first attempt comprehensively to map the variety of forms that despair can take, to reconstruct the ineffable shapes of human extremity as fully and faithfully as possible. Presenting the results of one of the largest studies ever undertaken, the book is based on well over 600 interviews (and related background material) dealing with the self-destructive acts of men and women in prison. It is thus also a portrait of the impact of incarceration, bringing to life the prison world as seen through the eyes of those who suffer in confinement. Hundreds of inmates, speaking in their own words, here present a firsthand view of their experience with all its nuances and pathos. Following an introductory chapter on the scope and methods of the research, the first part of the book presents the major themes of coping that emerged from the study--the fundamental concerns of people under stress (potency, fear, need for support) as they are manifested in difficulties with the environment, with perception of the self and others, and with impulse management. Part Two takes up the questions of how typical are inmates who injure themselves and in what ways they differ from their peers--and major differences in risk and in themes of coping are shown to be related to age, sex, ethnic background, previous experiences with drugs and with personal violence, and incarceration in jails before sentence and in prisons. Part Three presents detailed psychological autopsies of men who ended their lives in prison cells, providing a convincing (and heart-rending) view of the process of human breakdown as it unfolds over time. The book will be important not only to criminologists and penologists but also--and because of its profound general implications--to all those sociologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and administrators of institutions who wish to understand and effectively to deal with the tragic problems of human breakdown. Hans Toch is professor of psychology in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Albany. He is an elected fellow of the American Psychological Association as well as the American Society of Criminology. He has been president of the American Association of Forensic Psychology. He was also the Project Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Crime and Delinquency at Sacramento, California.
