Word: prisons
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...makes a fair job of conveying the sheer tedium of prison life, in the sense that reading his book feels like a jail sentence. After describing the already well-documented horrors of Klong Prem Central Prison (rats, roaches, squat toilets), Botts spends his time smoking heroin and giving his fellow convicts amusing nicknames. "The Brit looked like a gravedigger with his wide stained teeth and sinister smile," he writes. "We named him the Gravedigger...
...force into thinking that smuggling out heroin in cans of shaving foam is a sensible way to earn a living. The second question is tougher. But apart from Alex Garland's classic novel The Beach, the books I see most tourists reading in Thailand are the his-and-hers prison memoirs The Damage Done (convicted Australian heroin trafficker Warren Fellows' account of life in Bang Kwang Central Prison) and Forget You Had A Daughter (by British smuggler Sandra Gregory). Wherever you go in the country, you find foreigners sipping cocktails on beautiful white-sand beaches and reading about how horrible...
...According to a front-cover quote from David McMillan, the author of Escape - another Klong Prem memoir, released in 2007 by the same publisher - Botts "opens his real-life experiences like a knife opening a cadaver." In fact, Botts' account is unharrowing. His description of a prison shack in what he calls "the garden," a flyblown island of mud and compacted human waste where the cons passed their days, reminded me of a scuzzy bungalow I once stayed in on Koh Samui...
...problem with Nightmare in Bangkok, and books like it, is that it is hard to sympathize with the narrator. Botts, who is eventually transferred to a U.S. prison and granted parole after spending less than five years at Klong Prem, is not a lovable rogue but a thief and heroin trafficker, and his time behind bars prompts little self-reflection. Seeming to sense this, he closes the book with a lame attempt to recast his dismal life as a parable about overcoming addiction, with the suggestion that he should never have been jailed. I agree with him that criminalizing drug...
...Madoff is so drunk on the power and the wealth and the illusion of do-gooding that he truly may not have seen it coming. "There was no living in the future," says Galieti. That's just as well. For a 70-year-old man facing 20 years in prison, the past is all that's left...