Reviews for Barack Obama: 44th President Collector's Vault

The average rating for Barack Obama: 44th President Collector's Vault based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-03-21 00:00:00 Hiroshi Kawabata What can I say about George. This is a troublesome one for me. George got done for robbing a petrol station in California -- a $70 heist -- and got one year to life as a sentence. He was advised to plead guilty, on the understanding that the one year part of the deal would see him out of the clink in next to no time. In fact, he spent the next decade -- his term started in 1960 -- in prison. At the time, the California penal system (is it any different now) was intensely racist, pitting blacks, aryan-brotherhood whites and Mexicans against each other deliberately, certainly by Jackson's accounts. The book is a collection of George's letters, and while they begin several years into his incarceration, you do get a glimpse of him as he moves from disgruntled young man to serious, hardcore Maoist politics. He gives it to his parents with both rhetorical barrels, for being pawns of the system. His dad is totally brainwashed and unworthy of respect. His mum's that terrible scourge of the revolutionary: the emasculating woman. There's a fair dollop of George going for the old patriarchal malarky of 'women are too irrational to be revolutionaries' and 'black women should stop robbing black men of their masculinity' etc. This is certainly just of its time, I suppose. It's interesting, however, when Angela Davis appears in the book. She appears toward the end of the book, no doubt as George writes to her following her hounding by old bonzo dog doo head Ronald Reagan, then governator of California and scourge of all things left-learning. She's a communist. And she's a feminist. And given the tenor of George's letters to her, she's had a word with him about his attitude to the sisters in the movement. We read George's letters to his little brother -- the strange pride he feels when his brother scores with an older lady. We get lots of George's revolutionary thought, which feels sort of ... Stalinist ... by modern standards. 'The people will control the factories and be motivated to treat each other fairly, just as they do in the USSR and Cuba' type stuff. But he has a wonderful way of railing against God, which I found fascinating. Almost like he would, if he could, become more Old Testament than the God of the Old Testament, and kick God's arse if he could, in a suitably Old Testament way. Send a ravenous she-bear to mix things up. Or maybe just take a baseball bat to God's head. He's an angry dude. And he does a great line in longing. He falls in love -- or maybe it's infatuation -- with his female correspondents, and is really quite poetic in his letters to them. He writes, I think, with a kind of frustrated fantasticness (not a word, I fear) that's really a pleasure to read. And so, what do I think? Worth a read for these things, and to really get a good gulp of the revolution as it existed in poor George's mind, and was envisaged at the time. And it's also worth reading to counter that stupid debate that says we'd lower crime rates if we'd just make prison tougher. Not really buying that old chestnut. But perhaps that's one for another time. But it's generally an interesting book and well worth reading, I'd hazard.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-08-16 00:00:00 Randall Pulver A classic in its time, Soledad Brother is the autobiographical story of George Jackson who was arrested at 19 for stealing $70 at gunpoint from a gas station and sentenced to a one year to life in prison. In prison, he became politically aware and read widely: Mao, Lenin, Marx and joined the Black Panther party. This book talks about his self-education during years of solitary confinement and the injustice in the penal system heavily weighted against african-americans. It is a fascinating read and presaged his violent end. Having been attacked by neo-Nazis of the Aryan Nation in the Soledad Prison yard, he made an escape attempt and was killed by guards at 29 years old. He became a "cause celebre" for the radical black community. These letters are then sort of his will and testament and along with the Angela Davis and Malcolm X autobiographies provide the most poignant insights into this movement that still resonates today where some basic injustices denounced by these militants have not really changed enough (Ferguson, etc).