Can a book start a prison riot?
Author Dave Zirin recently began a correspondence with Texas death row inmate Kenneth Foster, whose case has become a symbol of that state’s noose-happy ways. After Foster told Zirin how much he liked one of the author’s books, Zirin tried to send him a copy of an earlier book, What’s My Name Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the U.S. According to Zirin’s account in the Houston Chronicle, he got back a letter from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice saying that the book “contains material that a reasonable person would construe as written solely for the purpose of communicating information designed to achieve the breakdown of prisons through offender disruption such as strikes or riots.”
As far as book reviews go, that’s one of the harshest we’ve ever read. Let’s see a publicist pull a blurb out of that….
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