The I Index

Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison

Maybe someday

39

/100

I Index Overall Rating

Readers

11/100

Critics

67/100

Scholars

N/A

Author:

Daniel Genis

Publisher:

Viking

Date:

February 22, 2022

In 2003, fresh out of NYU, Daniel Genis was working in publishing. But he was also hiding a serious heroin addiction that led him into debt and burglary. After he was arrested for robbing people at knifepoint in 2003, Daniel Genis was sentenced to 12 years (10 with good behavior), surviving the decade by reading 1,046 books, weightlifting, having philosophical discussions with various inmates, encountering violence on a daily basis, working at a serious of prison jobs, and in general observing an existence for which nothing in his life had prepared him.

What The Reviewers Say

Kathy Sexton,
Booklist
[Genis] devotes a chapter to Rikers itself, because it’s Rikers; the rest of the book is organized into facets of prison life and its inhabitants, with a level of detail that’s staggering.
Margaret Heller,
Library Journal
[Genis] examines his past, drug addiction, the robberies that landed him in jail in New York, and his 10-year prison sentence with a detachment that is resonant of the type of anthropological thinking and lack of visible emotion he found necessary for survival.

Publishers Weekly
Striking and soulful.

Kirkus
A sharp, wry memoir.