Paranoia & Heartbreak

I’m still on hospital duty, but does that mean you won’t have anything to read? Certainly not.

Here’s a review I was lucky enough to write for this week’s Seattle Times:

“Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility” by Jerome Gold

(Seven Stories Press, 344 pp., $19.95)

Jerome Gold has been in danger most of his adult life, in ways both visible and hidden.

As a soldier in Vietnam and later a rehabilitation counselor in a Washington state juvenile-detention facility, his survival hung on luck and intelligent caution, some days in equal measure. As a writer, he seems to live with the same ratio of risk and careful craft.

Reading “Paranoia & Heartbreak,” a journal of Gold’s years in what amounts to a prison for kids is like waking up in one of those Hieronymus Bosch paintings full of punishment and predatory reveling. First the horror overwhelms; over time it comes into focus as familiar surroundings. Evil becomes almost normal.

Read the rest here.