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Sentence
- Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison
- Narrated by: Daniel Genis
- Length: 13 hrs and 36 mins
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Publisher's Summary
A memoir of a decade in prison by a well-educated young addict known as the "Apologetic Bandit".
In 2003, fresh out of NYU, Daniel Genis was working in publishing as his writer father had always expected. 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 nicknamed the "apologetic bandit" in the press, given his habit of apologizing to his victims as he took their cash. He 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 series of prison jobs, and in general observing an existence for which nothing in his life had prepared him.
Sentence is one of the most striking prison memoirs - and memoirs in general - in recent years - written with intelligence, wit, empathy, and remarkable style. Genis is the son of a famous Soviet émigré writer, broadcaster, and culture critic in Russia. He grew up in a home whose visitors included Mikhail Baryshnikov; Russian nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov; authors Kurt Vonnegut, Umberto Eco, and Norman Mailer; and Czech film director Miloš Forman. The education and culture so prized by his family were his lifeline during his decade in prison, and he describes in unsparing and vivid detail the realities of daily life in the New York penal system, from Rikers Island through a series of upstate institutions. He learns about the social strata of gangs, the "court" system that sets geographic boundaries in prison yards, how sex was obtained, the black market of drugs and more practical goods, the inventiveness required for everyday tasks such as cooking, and how debilitating solitary confinement actually is - all while trying to preserve his relationship with his recently married wife.
Daniel Genis' debut has the potential to be both a critical and popular success, for few books have portrayed prison so vividly or with such insight.
What listeners say about Sentence
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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- Thomas M. Elder
- 03-15-22
Needs a better reader
This was a fascinating look inside the New York penal system, but my pleasure was diminished considerably by the reader. it sounded like a Woody Allen wannabe was reading.
2 people found this helpful
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- Dutch Denson
- 01-26-23
Top notch prison narrative
Thoroughly engaging story of an intellectuals decade in the New York state prison system.
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- osvaldo
- 11-12-22
Great but slow
Great book to listen to, but speed it up to 1.4 for a better experience
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- Mazeman
- 04-27-22
Great description of prison life
I found the description of life behind bars very interesting. Would have liked a little more specific integration with the substance of the books he read. The author's performance was great and added authenticity.
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Story
At the age of 16, R. Dwayne Betts - a good student from a lower-middle-class family - carjacked a man with a friend. He had never held a gun before, but within a matter of minutes he had committed six felonies. A bright young kid, he served his nine-year sentence as part of the adult population in some of the worst prisons in the state. A Question of Freedom chronicles Betts's years in prison, reflecting back on his crime, and looking ahead to how his experiences and the books he discovered while incarcerated would define him.
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Story of Hope
- By Chicago873 on 02-24-23
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Writing My Wrongs
- Life, Death, and One Man's Story of Redemption in an American Prison
- By: Shaka Senghor
- Narrated by: Shaka Senghor
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1991, Shaka Senghor was sent to prison for second-degree murder. Today he is a lecturer at universities, a leading voice on criminal justice reform, and an inspiration to thousands.
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My Inspiration
- By Max on 03-15-16
By: Shaka Senghor
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American Prison
- A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
- By: Shane Bauer
- Narrated by: James Fouhey, Shane Bauer
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for nine dollars an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough and wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War.
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Disgusting
- By Frank on 09-23-18
By: Shane Bauer
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My Midnight Years
- Surviving Jon Burge's Police Torture Ring and Death Row
- By: Ronald Kitchen, Thai Jones, Logan M. McBride
- Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
- Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Ronald Kitchen was 21, on his way to buy milk for his four-year-old, when he was picked up by the Chicago police, brutally tortured, and coerced to confess to five counts of heinous murder. He spent 22 years in prison, 13 of those on death row, labeled as a monster. Kitchen was only one of the many victims of Jon Burge and his notorious Midnight Crew that terrorized and incarcerated Black men - 118 have come forward so far - on the south side of Chicago for nearly two decades.
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Awesome Book!!!
- By Miked9746 on 11-15-20
By: Ronald Kitchen, and others
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My Life Among the Serial Killers
- Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Murderers
- By: Helen Morrison M.D., Harold Goldberg
- Narrated by: Helen Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins
- Abridged
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Dr. Helen Morrison has profiled more than 80 serial killers around the world. What she has learned about them will shatter every assumption you've ever had about the most notorious killers known to man.
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Boring reader,boring writing
- By P. Minor on 02-03-08
By: Helen Morrison M.D., and others
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Street Poison
- The Biography of Iceberg Slim
- By: Justin Gifford
- Narrated by: J. D. Jackson
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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From a career as a, yes, ruthless pimp in the '40s and '50s, Iceberg Slim refashioned himself as the first and still the greatest of the "street lit" masters, whose vivid books have made him an icon to such rappers as Ice-T, Jay-Z, and Snoop Dogg and a presiding spirit of "blaxploitation" culture.
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A must read for all Robert Beck fans.
- By JMKIII58 on 09-15-16
By: Justin Gifford
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In the Place of Justice
- A Story of Punishment and Deliverance
- By: Wilbert Rideau
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 16 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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From Wilbert Rideau, the award-winning journalist who spent 44 years in Louisiana prisons working against unimaginable odds to redeem himself, the story of a remarkable life: A crime, its punishment, and ultimate triumph. After killing a woman in a moment of panic following a botched bank robbery, Rideau, denied a fair trial, was improperly sentenced to death at the age of 19. After more than a decade on death row, his sentence was amended to life imprisonment, and he joined the inmate population of the infamous Angola penitentiary.
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Rideau and Hoffman are BRILLANT!!
- By Gary Kastal on 07-03-10
By: Wilbert Rideau
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The Devil's Defender
- My Odyssey Through American Criminal Justice from Ted Bundy to the Kandahar Massacre
- By: John Henry Browne
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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For the last four decades, John Henry Browne has defended the indefensible. From Facebook folk hero the "Barefoot Bandit" Colton Moore, to Benjamin Ng of the Wah Mee massacre and Kandahar massacre culprit Sergeant Robert Bales, Browne's unceasing advocacy and the daring to take on some of the most unwinnable cases - and nearly win them all - has led 48 Hours' Peter Van Sant to call him "the most famous lawyer in America."
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Not what it promises
- By this app on DROID sucks dont get on 02-25-18
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The Black Hand
- The Bloody Rise and Redemption of "Boxer" Enriquez, a Mexican Mob Killer
- By: Chris Blatchford
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Rene "Boxer" Enriquez grew up on the violent streets of East L.A., where gang fights, robberies, and drive-by shootings were fueled by rage, drugs, and alcohol. When he finally landed in prison - at the age of 19 - Enriquez found an organization that brought him the respect he always wanted: the near-mythic and widely feared Mexican Mafia, La Eme. What the organization saw in Enriquez was a young man who knew no fear and would kill anyone - justifiably or not - in the blink of an eye.
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Intense, brutal, and informative
- By E on 07-08-15
By: Chris Blatchford
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Hard Time
- By: Shaun Attwood
- Narrated by: Randal Schaffer
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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After a SWAT team smashed down stock-market millionaire Shaun Attwood's door, he found himself inside of Arizona's deadliest jail and locked into a brutal struggle for survival. Shaun's hope of living the American Dream turned into a nightmare of violence and chaos, when he had a run-in with Sammy the Bull Gravano, an Italian Mafia mass murderer. Join Shaun on a harrowing voyage into the darkest recesses of human existence.
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Bad Ending.
- By Nick on 12-01-17
By: Shaun Attwood
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Limonov
- The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia
- By: Emmanuel Carrère, John Lambert - translator
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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This is how Emmanuel Carrère, the magnetic journalist, novelist, filmmaker, and chameleon, describes his subject: "Limonov is not a fictional character. There. I know him. He has been a young punk in Ukraine, the idol of the Soviet underground; a bum, then a multimillionaire's butler in Manhattan; a fashionable writer in Paris; a lost soldier in the Balkans; and now, in the fantastic shambles of postcommunism, the elderly but charismatic leader of a party of young desperadoes."
By: Emmanuel Carrère, and others
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The Master Plan
- My Journey From Life in Prison to a Life of Purpose
- By: Chris Wilson, Bret Witter, Wes Moore - foreword
- Narrated by: Chris Wilson, Wes Moore
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up in a tough Washington, D.C., neighborhood, Chris Wilson was so afraid for his life he wouldn't leave the house without a gun. One night, defending himself, he killed a man. At 18, he was sentenced to life in prison with no hope of parole. But what should have been the end of his story became the beginning. Deciding to make something of his life, Chris embarked on a journey of self-improvement - reading, working out, learning languages, even starting a business. He wrote his Master Plan: a list of all he expected to accomplish or acquire.
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"Read books that feed your soul."
- By WindyCityDreamin on 03-17-20
By: Chris Wilson, and others
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Jailhouse Doc: A Doctor in the County Jail
- By: William Wright
- Narrated by: Eric Martin
- Length: 5 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. William Wright gave up a suburban practice as an ear surgeon to become the doctor at Colorado's maximum-security prison. After that, running a medical clinic at the county jail should be a snap, right? Oh, brother. Hoards of desperate people fresh from the streets, homeless addicts, illegal aliens, and gangbangers all ruled by a corrupt sheriff and his concubine sidekick made the supermax look almost pastoral.
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Beware the politics of corrections health care
- By Jan on 11-15-15
By: William Wright
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Black Bird
- By: James Keene, Hillel Levin
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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James Keene had it all: cars, girls, houses up and down the Gold Coast. But behind his well-connected star athlete façade was a money-obsessed drug dealer desperate to make the big score to get him out of the business. When he was sentenced to prison, it seemed the only lessons he would learn would be about navigating convict society. Instead, he was offered a chance to regain his freedom in return for going undercover in the nation’s highest security prison for the criminally insane.
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Very sobering and unfortunately true
- By M. Hatfield on 03-24-17
By: James Keene, and others