Sing Sing Follies (A Maximum-Security Comedy): And Other True Stories

"I can't wait for you to read this. I hope it thrills and confounds and inspires you just like it did me." -Greg Kwedar, co-writer, director, and producer of Sing SingAt Sing Sing, the infamous, Gothic maximum-security prison on the Hudson River in New York, some of the incarcerated pass their time and slay inner demons performing theater-in this case, a silly slapstick comedy about pirates, gladiators, and mummies on a wacky journey through time.
An article about this very special theater, written by veteran literary journalist John H. Richardson, is now a major motion picture starring Coleman Domingo. In this collection of magazine stories from Esquire and New York, Richardson showcases seven of his most bizarre and eye-opening journeys into the American scene and psyche. Along with the story that became the movie Sing Sing, read about:"The Search for Isabella V, " is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, involving a fugitive heiress, lots of money, one very real gun, and layer upon layer of internet intimacy and digital deception.
In "I Should Have Been There to Protect Him, " we meet Michael Brown Sr., whose son was gunned down by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri and left to bleed in the street. In "The Abortion Ministry of Dr. Willie Parker, " an abortion doctor, raised Christian in the South, tries to bring services to women who need it; and in "Ballad of the Sad Climatologists" we meet men and women whose lives are filled with the grim facts of climate change day after day, making a good night's sleep hard to come by.
"Children of Ted, " brings us face to face with the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. In the decades since his last deadly act of ecoterrorism, he has become an unlikely prophet to a whole new generation of young acolytes. Finally, we hear from the author himself as he tells the story of his father, a high-ranking CIA spy. Writes magazine historian Alex Belth: "Richardson has the detached, nonjudgmental, observational eye of the perpetual outsider.
He's curious and smart, a realist with a spiky, mordant sense of humor; a truth-seeker, whether writing about abortion clinic doctors, gun advocates, or faded B-movie stars. Richardson loves characters on the fringe." And so will you.