On December 14, 1992, Gregory Gibson’s eighteen-year-old son Galen was murdered, shot in the doorway of his college library by a fellow student gone berserk. The killer was jailed for life, but for Gibson the tragedy was still unfolding. The morning of the shooting, he learned, college officials had intercepted but not stopped a box of ammunition addressed to the murderer. They were also anonymously warned of the intended killing but failed to call the police. After years of frustrated attempts to find peace, Gibson woke one morning to a terrible vision of his own rage and helplessness. He knew he had to do something before he destroyed himself, and he resolved to discover and document the forces that led to Galen’s death. Gone Boy follows Gibson as he visits the gun seller, as well as detectives, lawyers, psychiatrists, politicians, and college bureaucrats— a cast of characters as vivid as those in a Raymond Chandler mystery. Hailed by the New York Times and others for its evocative style and courage in confronting guns, violence, and manhood in America today, this wrenching memoir speaks in the voice of a man struggling to turn grief and rage into acceptance and understanding.
This book is the first of five about growing up in Oakland California and in the swamps in New Orleans in the mid seventies and eighties. It is loosely based on my experiences and the things I witnessed as a child and later as a man. Ghetto life is real, Murder for profit, Drug Dealers, Pimps , Murder for hire, Sex, Drug Addiction, mine and others; Child Molestation, Illegal Dog fights, Gambling, Prostitution and my ultimate incarceration. A little bit of everything. With permission from the streets given, there will be many more stories depicting life on the streets from the people who lived it and died for it. Im writing from prison and trying to get a publishing deal. Its past time for a REAL Bay Area writer from the REAL streets to tell it like it is.
Praised as “a work of wild, vaulting ambition and achievement” by Entertainment Weekly, Jamie O’Neill’s first novel invites comparison to such literary greats as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Charles Dickens. Jim Mack is a naïve young scholar and the son of a foolish, aspiring shopkeeper. Doyler Doyle is the rough-diamond son—revolutionary and blasphemous—of Mr. Mack’s old army pal. Out at the Forty Foot, that great jut of rock where gentlemen bathe in the nude, the two boys make a pact: Doyler will teach Jim to swim, and in a year, on Easter of 1916, they will swim to the distant beacon of Muglins Rock and claim that island for themselves. All the while Mr. Mack, who has grand plans for a corner shop empire, remains unaware of the depth of the boys’ burgeoning friendship and of the changing landscape of a nation. Set during the year preceding the Easter Uprising of 1916—Ireland’s brave but fractured revolt against British rule—At Swim, Two Boys is a tender, tragic love story and a brilliant depiction of people caught in the tide of history. Powerful and artful, and ten years in the writing, it is a masterwork from Jamie O’Neill.