Customer Reviews

God of the Rodeo: The Search for Hope, Faith, and a Six-Second Ride in Louisiana's Angola Prison

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a fascinating book. I thought it would focus on the rodeo that Angola holds each October, but that's just a starting point. The rodeo gets him there, but like all good writers, Bergner realizes that a larger, deeper story exists. He sets out to spend a year at the prison. But, as often happens to good writers, the story that he expects to find is not the one that he finds. The book goes into a completely different direction that he, or readers, ever expected. Once the twists take place, I felt pulled into the book. There are times when I wanted more information, such as the end when he relates what happened to the people he discussed. And there are times when I skimmed, feeling like there were more details than necessary. But, overall, the book is a winner.

"God of the Rodeo," by Daniel Bergner, 1998, is a great book, an excellent account of life incarcerating and being incarcerated in Louisiana's Angola penitentiary, a former slave plantation on which much has changed and much has not. The book is also about the struggle required in order to write such a book, a struggle that has recently been made much harder. Compare the following quotes.

(1)"There are countries in which public establishments are considered by the government as its own personal affair, so that it admits persons to them only according to its pleasure, just as a proprietor refuses at his pleasure admission into his house; they are a sort of administrative sanctuaries, into which no profane person can penetrate. These establishments, on the contrary, in the United States, are considered as belonging to all. The prisons are open to everyone who chooses to inspect them ad every visiter may inform himself of the order which regulates the interior." - Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, 1833

(2)"The United States Supreme Court, in a series of decisions going back to the 1970s, had helped to ensure that the nation's prisons stayed isolated and unknown, that criminals, once sent away, could be forgotten. . . .

" . . . A recent federal law, the Prison Litigation Reform Act, driven through Congress to ensure that incarceration not be too costly to the taxpayers or too joyful for the convicts, will likely free Angola from federal oversight within the coming months." - Daniel Bergner, 1998

Bergner handles, by his own account, many difficult situations with wisdom and grace. He proves his points and labels his speculations as such. He is neither cynical nor gullible. My one complaint is that he includes a passage toward the end (Chapter 15) in which he simultaneously preaches vengeance and quotes Jesus, apparently oblivious to the irony. Proclaiming any moral feat (in this case love of an enemy) impossible is always a moral disgrace. However great the majority of Americans who are unable to overcome the thirst for vengeance that Bergner attributes to all people, there is a minority being ignored, erased from the "natural" and "normal." This attitude is to blame for much of the horror depicted in Bergner's book.

January 1999

"God of the Rodeo" had the potential to be an outstanding story of life at the Louisiana State Prison known as Angola. The story is told from the inmate's viewpoint and mostly takes their sides.(How can you not like Littell?) The problem is Bergner needed an editor to organize his story. I would have liked to read more about some of the inmates and their families and much less about the author and his run-ins with Warden Cain. Within these limitations, I still recommend the book. It makes for an interesting gift idea!

This is an excellently writen book I would reccomend to anyone interested in prison life and the forces that compel one to live on despite a sentence of life behind bars.I recently visited Angola in October as a law student and found the place to be most intriguing. Mr. Bergner's account of everyhting I saw, including death row, is quite accurate. Also, his rendition of Louisiana politics is right on the mark. A really good read I would reccomend to anyone.

The positive reviews I have read here are mystifying. Bergner is a talented writer, for sure, but I really felt as if he mailed in this book more than anything. It sure didn't seem like he spent a year at Angola prison or even in the vicinity. Seemed more to me as if he flew down there every once in awhile to see what's up. The book starts off GREAT, the first third, and then proceeds to fall apart with the not-so-interesting details of his fight with warden Cain to retain his access. Once he wins that fight it's as if the author has lost his steam. The charcters, even warden Cain, don't seem to come to life and their story, the one he tells, just isn't so compelling. I just came away feeling that the author was worn out. Too bad, too. I had high hopes for this one. Want to read a book that DOES make this kind of access work? Try Pete Early's The Hot House, about his two or three years inside of Leavenworth.

God of the Rodeo is an exceptional book. Its novelistic rendering of the gripping stories of men who will spend the rest of their lives in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison results in an unsentimental -- but extremely moving -- story of life behind bars. Without being pedantic or political, the book forces us to confront the fact that while we have a right as a society to incarcerate these men for the brutal crimes they have committed, we have a moral obligation not to ignore them. The book also offers fascinating portraits of ministers who are among the few willing to devote time and attention to caring about these men. Whatever your view of our criminal justice system, God of the Rodeo is an important book to read. Moreover, its excellent writing makes this book a pleasure to read as well.

What a letdown. After the book-review hype, the NPR appearance, I expected a lot. Instead "God" is an ungripping expose of by now familiar material, told in an inexplicably breathless style. Sure, the individual inmates' stories are interesting; sure, the intrigue with the warden adds complexity. But Bergner has a hard time keeping his grip on which story he's telling at any one time, and his prose style (blurbed as "luminous") is mostly reminiscent of a college-level creative writer's attempt at a personal essay -- too much authorial participation in some places, too little where it's needed most. Sad to say, "God" just doesn't deliver.

Bergner has written a brave and fascinating book about the Angola prison in Louisiana. Not at all your standard prison fare, Bergner focuses not on the dark side of prison life but on the day-to-day lives of the prisoners and the events which make their existences bearable. The author was given the unusual opportunity to spend a year, basically unsupervised, wandering the grounds of this dreary but beautifully-set institution. This book is about hope in a place where there is none. It is about hope that is created, in part, by a freak-show-like rodeo hosted by the prison in which the virtually untrained prisoners take the dangerous roles of riders. In a sense, it is a heartbreaking look at the futurelessness of these life-term inmates. The inmates themselves tell us about their life-altering crimes and the demons that haunt them. At no point, however, does Bergner ask us to pity these men and we don't. Bergner's run-ins with the prison warden are books in themselves bringing into the light what we fear most in these situations: even the good guys are bad. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys non-fiction and is looking for a beautifully written and truly remarkable tale. I couldn't put it down!

I would never have bought this book for myself. I don't usually like books that are supposed to be "beautifully written" and poignant, and I don't like books that plug themselves with quotes from the likes of Sebastian ("The Quiet Storm") Junger. And, I especially don't like to read books by journalists who tells us that they have fallen in love with a misunderstood murderer but forget to tell us why their new buddy is locked away. In any event, I got the book as a gift and ran out of other stuff to read on a plane flight. So, I was stuck.

Yikes, was I wrong about this book. It was terrific. I expected it to be soft and sentimental. It wasn't. It was gutsy and intense and gave you the harsh world of Angola Prison. Now, I'm passing the damn thing out as gifts to friends. By the way, a week after I finished the sucker, Larry King of all people pumps the thing in his USA Today column. He called it fascinating. Forget the junk on the book's back cover, King says it's a must read. So, read it!

A final note: What's with that wierd review from the author's erstwhile friend? That guy should get himself a life.

Bergner's inside look reads more like an expose than a historical account, not surprising when one takes into consideration his background as a journalist. This account, however, it must be noted takes into account an extensive history of Angola State Prison. Bergner spent time there performing the work of a sociologist: observing, writing, detailing, getting to know the inmates on a personal basis; and even sometimes getting caught in the political tides of the prison administration. This work is as much designed for the general reader who seeks an understanding of the life of a prisoner as much as it is for the student of criminal justice or political science who seeks a knowledge base in prison life. Bergner's talents are clearly on display in this sociological masterpiece that clearly details the emotions of prison life. The graphic behavior exhibited by the characters in this work only serve to intensify the reality of prison life and drive home the point that Bergner makes, chiefly being that Angola State Prison, much like any other prison, is a world apart from normal society. This work is an inside view of that other world. It shocks just the same as Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities.