Concrete Carnival
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
You land in prison as a twenty-something, faced with the likelihood of spending the rest of your life behind the wall. What do you do? Danner Darcleight started writing. He writes about what he sees, what he has done, and the toll that such witnessing and his own past actions have exacted. Concrete Carnival brings us inside a maximum-security prison, introducing a colorful cast of rogues while revealing the day-to-day struggles experienced by millions of Americans now living inside the world's largest prison complex.
Haunted by his past, he slips the surly bonds of heroin. He gets stripped, deloused, and assigned an inmate number. He learns to navigate among sociopaths, gangbangers, drug dealers, hustlers, thieves, mercurial prison guards, and his own grinding remorse. He works through recurring thoughts of suicide, benefits from serendipitous encounters, and ultimately meets a loving woman who brings warmth to a harsh existence.
Darcleight pushes past the cliches and caricatures employed by pop culture, offering direct engagement with what it's really like to do time. What begins as frontline reportage becomes an unforgettable case study in resilience and determination against the worst imaginable odds.
An exhilarating, picaresque ride through the sights, sounds, and emotions of prison life, Concrete Carnival is a moving portrait of one man's long journey from hopelessness and addiction to love and redemption.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is a powerful memoir by first-time author Darcleight, who is currently serving 25 years to life for murder, a crime that he barely remembers committing while deeply addicted to heroin, "a dope-sick animal in a confined space." Locked away, he finds a new kind of "liberty" through reading and writing, "a freedom understood by losing everything and beginning the slow process of finding yourself anew in your early twenties." This process is grippingly told in this eloquent memoir of life with the freaks and fiends in various maximum-security institutions: "It's all a goddamned circus, you'll think to yourself sometimes, a concrete carnival." He learns to live with the violence, drug abuse, isolation, and suicide around him, eventually beginning a correspondence with a woman who helps him realize that "we survive to find our purpose for others." Darcleight, whose prison writings have appeared in the Kenyon Review and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was, by his own admission, a below-average student who was expelled from college. But after immersing himself in the work of prison writers such as Piper Kerman and Jean Genet as well as consuming "a happy cocktail of stoicism, existentialism, and optimism" from Seneca, Victor Frankl, and Voltaire Darcleight has written a searing look at life inside the criminal justice system. This review has been corrected to fix a misspelling in Piper Kerman's name.
