Leslie Schwartz

This was a very difficult book for me to read and I cried so many times while reading it. A boy gets lost in the snow because his father left him unattended in an unlocked car for about fifteen minutes.
The consequences of this one foolish act play out as the tragedy extends to touch all the residents of the little town of Angel's Crest.
But the loss of course was most with the father Ethan, a quiet hard-working hardware store owner, and his ex-wife Cindy, who has been walking the self-destruct alcoholic path even before her divorce from Ethan.

The novel is written from multiple perspective, and although this device gives more depth to the story its use here meant repeating some scenes from one chapter in another which, in my opinion, stuttered the story flow. I also felt it was an additional ploy to squeeze more raw emotions out of the reader in reaction to the senseless tragedy.
In my opinion this books would have worked perfectly as a short story, because much of what happens in it is just reflection on the same issues from multiple point of view.
What the writer wants to say in the end is that people need an anchor in their lives, it has to be either love or faith and life cannot continue when a person lacks both. This is a generally accepted theory but I do not like its implications of the book because faith might save an alcoholic loser while a quiet dependable father who made one very costly mistake could find himself without any hope or reason to live.
But I guess this is how life works, perhaps people invented faith to be able to carry on living.… (mais)

Author Leslie Schwartz loses her sobriety and, after an extended period of drunkenness and drug use, finds herself sentenced to a squalid county jail for DWI and battery of a police officer (a charge she denies, even though she pleaded guilty to it). The Lost Chapters tells the story of her thirty-seven day incarceration with female inmates not of her socioeconomic class and of the books that were her lifeline as she waited for the time to pass.

Schwartz writes beautifully about some of the books that saved her (others she dismisses in a few sentences), but there was something about the narrative I didn't quite connect with. I expected to feel more sympathy towards her than I actually did. Her 414-day bender doesn't seem to have alienated anyone important in her life, and her "movie-star handsome" husband and her cast of loving friends all stand by her and send her books during her abbreviated sentence. All the inmates who are "smart" (her adjective of approval) love her as well (the guards and trustees, whom she calls "kapos", she deems of lower intelligence). For a recovering addict, she's very self-satisfied. So, while I liked this book, and even plan to pick up some of the books that sustained the author during her stint in jail, I still have mixed feelings about it.… (mais)

Thoincredible,. I was thoroughly captivated by this raw and honest accounting of z very bad time in this authors life. After more than a decade of sobriety, she has a relapse of drug and alcohol use that lasts for 414 days. She is in author, a wife and mother, not at all representative of the stereotypical user. She blacks out, doesn't remember much from those days, not the hurt the inflicted on her friends, family, something in which she has a hard time forgiving herself. She hits bottom, when she gets a DUI, the officers claiming she assaulted them during her arrest, and she is sentenced to ninth days in a Los Angeles jail.

She has plenty of time to come to terms with the harm she has caused to those she loves, and she will learn plenty about the reality of jail. Books become her lifeline, though she only allowed to receive three a week, directly from Amazon, these become her lifeline. She also finds there are few like herself, white, economically stable, the women are mostly poor, different ethnicities, prostitutes and the like. The cruelty of the guards, the constant mind games played, it will not be the women she fears, but those in charge. Those with the power. The relationships she makes in jdil, the stories of their lives that she gets to know, were my favorite parts of the book. The most touching. Also, of course the books she chooses to read.

Her story is raw, honest, she is hard on herself, and hard on a system that impridons the poor, the mentally I'll and the already abused. It is hard not to be affected by her story and those of the other women. I have a few other books I am following up with this one, [book:Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, & Criminal in 19th-Century New York|35489149] and American Jail.

"I have time to think about things now. To think about the way a book feels in my hand, or tastes or sounds. I have never loved so hard and with such fidelity and reciprocation. Books can break your heart, but they never leave you."

"It still made me rage, recalling the sbuse of power. But in jail i grasped a bigger truth, a more painful reality. Now I understood that much of the time, especially where addicts and the mentally I'll and the poor are concerned, justice isn't justice, it's personal. This explained why 99% of the people inside are people of color. The realization sliced me open. Sometimes knowledge is like being carved in half."… (mais)