Chain Gang All-Stars – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
I almost stopped reading this book twice, despite the critical acclaim it has received. The opening chapters seemed repetitive as Adjei-Brenyah slowly introduced a series of characters through similar sets of events. They are all convicted felons working to earn their freedom by participating in the Chain Gang All-Stars, a competition where inmates fought each other in a gruesome, ramped-up, American Gladiators-style competition. Survive long enough and your record gets expunged and you go free. The catch is each battle is to the death, so the odds of winning enough fights to be released are extremely low.
The felons who survive over time become celebrities, all of their daily activities recorded and broadcast for an eager public. They get sponsors and special treatment. Stadiums are filled with adoring fans who dress like them and repeat their catch phrases.
Once the story settled and moved beyond that introductory third or so, it got much better. One particular Chain, or team of competitors, is led by two women who are both deep into their careers. One is approaching enough wins to earn her freedom. The other is not far behind. It turns out that the rules can be changed, on the fly, to make gaining freedom nearly impossible.
Throughout, Adjei-Brenyah sprinkles footnotes that point to the reality of our American prison system. Despite our society’s alleged abhorrence of “cruel and unusual” punishment, there are countless examples of prisoners being treated in cruel and unusual ways. The Chain Gang All Stars is just a natural progression from that, combining our love for spectacle, competition, and reality TV with a new way to punish our worst criminals.
I think that’s the most interesting part of his story. He is far from the first to get the reader/viewer to root for people who are, genuinely, the bad guys. There are many moments when the reader is bluntly reminded that these are not good people. In the process, though, he gets you to think about complex subjects like prison reform, what punishment is appropriate for people who have murdered and raped, how much should we consider the conditions the incarcerated were raised in or lived in when determining the price they must pay for their crimes, and what role should the context of a crime play when imprisoning the perpetrator? The book doesn’t leave you feeling good about any of it.
Fortunately, we would never stoop to this level as a society, turning convicted criminals into reality stars and watching them brutally murder each other every week, right? Well, unless you are a truly horrific person running for office on a platform of denigrating and sub-humanizing anyone who doesn’t fit your narrow view of what a real American is.
OK, that’s not fair. He just wants immigrants to fight each other for sport. He didn’t say anything about it being to the death. But slippery slopes and whatnot…
The Wager – David Grann
Another fine yarn from Grann, this time about an 18th century British ship that struggled and then wrecked in the heavy seas while attempting to round Cape Horn and the aftermath, which included multiple mutinies, multiple escape paths for the survivors, and multiple trials in England for those who made the long journey home.
Grann admits at the very beginning he wasn’t there, and is recreating events as best he can from the records that survived. That might be the most remarkable thing about this book: that so many public records do exist from the small number of men who survived the initial shipwreck and made it back to England. One log/journal was especially rich in detail and allowed us a deep look into what the men experienced. That’s just enough material to turn this into a super-engaging read.
There are some similarities to the experiences of Ernest Shackleton and his crew in their failed Antarctic expedition nearly 200 years later, if you’re into that kind of thing.