You Can't Win

Rating:
Summary: Snapshot of Hidden Americana
Review: "You Can't Win" is an economically-written autobio that scorches through a vagabond criminal's life from episode to episode, drawing a clear map of the American West and Canada at the turn of the last century, laced by railroads and dotted with crummy little junction towns, booming mining camps, cities like San Francisco or Vancouver just beginning to form themselves into outposts of civilization. Jack Black is a natural storyteller, perhaps learning how to frame an episode and bring home the punch line while sitting around the campfires of hobo jungles. He's also an expert observer of people, perhaps because of his profession of sizing up victims while watching out for plainclothes police. His style connects with Dickens, especially the quick, incisive way he delineates each of the characters who fill the book with their distinctive patter, clothes, and habits. Black writes about reading everything he could, and I think he's somewhat deliberate in his expositions. The book is also fairly Romantic - Black's editing out of his personal sexuality, his love of the outdoors, enjoyment of companionship, are 19th-Century sentiments. It reminded me of Brendan Behan's "Borstal Boy," also about incarceration and the criminal life, without the sex - where Behan is fairly obvious in his affections for his cellmates, Black is silent. "You Can't Win" reminded me of "Black Range Tales," another rare personal experience of the real Old West, written by Uncle Jimmy McKenna, a silver prospector who worked and traveled in many of the same places at the same times as Black. McKenna manages to be just as interesting (and romantic) as Black, without the heinous crimes or drug addiction. Black's best quality is his refusal, here, to feel sorry for himself or place blame for his plight on anything but his own choices.

Rating:
Summary: Underworld figure talks up prison reform
Review: "You Can't Win," is an entertaining romp through the underworld of the American West at the beginning of the twentieth century, although the book masquerades as an anti-crime and prison reform tract. Sparsely written, yet thoroughly picturesque and descriptive, "You Can't Win" was written by Jack Black, burglar, safecracker, stick-up man, and penitentiary kingpin gone good. Traveling through a world of saloons, mining camps, and raucous western cities like San Francisco and Seattle, Black brings to vivid life a world of the 1900s we rarely see in textbooks.

In the end, Black urges us to stick to the straight and narrow, rues the path that brought him to morphine and state penitentiaries. Indeed, throughout the narrative, Black sprinkles cautionary paragraphs intended to discourage would-be imitators. But there's such a streak of enthusiasm and nostalgia running through Black's book that it's hard to believe that he regrets most of what he did. The stuff that he REALLY regrets seems to be what's left out - and there's a lot left out. That period he "terrorized" San Francisco - according to the afterword - his shooting of an unarmed man, the drug business he subsequently set up in prison.

Black's world is extremely moral, if not above the law. There's a strong sense of loyalty running through the book, and an ethical hierarchy, at the bottom of which lie "stool pigeons" and "double crossers," and at the top are the reliable men who keep their word and pay their debts. Those who make the cut, who play by the unwritten rules of lawbreaking and loyalty are the "Johnsons," the family of thieves.

No wonder those literary poseurs, the Beats, glommed onto this book as an instructional how-to, not as a cautionary tale of morality. The Beats were attracted to the underworldly anti-establishment characters, the bums, the hobos, and the fences. In the introduction to "You Can't Win," William S. Burroughs takes Black's message further by adding a second category in opposition to the "Johnsons," the "poops." (Using a different word, of course, which won't pass Amazon's censorship.) Either you're a "Johnson" or you're a "poop," Burroughs says, and with a swooping unJohsonlike gesture indicts everybody who prefers work to thievery.

Black himself would reject the notion of casting most of us into "poopdom." He had great respect for honest people, even those that he robbed. Sure they might be a bit slow, but they often plied a trade, bothered no one, and lived fulfilled. He blamed his own inability to keep straight on some mysterious internal defect, refusing to praise or justify his violent past.. Burroughs, of course, born into a life of priviledge and wealth, and who chose to squander his advantages on drugs and self-entertainment, prefers to justify his own excesses (including the shooting death of his wife) and grab onto the title of "Johnson," as if it were a badge of honor.

But putting my attacks on the Beats aside, the importance of this book lies in its examination of criminality. What makes a criminal? How can we keep young people from growing up into a life of crime? Although Black provides us with few answers, he gives us the example of his own life. He claims that his experiences in prison made him more of a criminal, and that the aggressive response of law enforcement officials to his deeds pushed him further into crime. It was the prison strait-jacket treatment that turned him bad, that put him behind a gun, that made him dangerous. And it was a judge's act of kindness that convinced him to reform. In order to cut down on vicous criminals, Black suggests more leniency on first-time offenders, more job opportunities and support for ex-cons, and an end to the death penalty and other cruel punishements.

After meeting a man who's been there, who walked on the other side of law and order, after getting to know, respect, and like the man, it's hard to argue with that conclusion. Those behind bars are people, not animals, machines, or rocks. And let's face it, in recent years our prison and police system has only created more criminals, not to mention caused the deaths of hundreds of men and women.

Rating:
Summary: Snapshot of Hidden Americana
Review: "You Can't Win" is an economically-written autobio that scorches through a vagabond criminal's life from episode to episode, drawing a clear map of the American West and Canada at the turn of the last century, laced by railroads and dotted with crummy little junction towns, booming mining camps, cities like San Francisco or Vancouver just beginning to form themselves into outposts of civilization. Jack Black is a natural storyteller, perhaps learning how to frame an episode and bring home the punch line while sitting around the campfires of hobo jungles. He's also an expert observer of people, perhaps because of his profession of sizing up victims while watching out for plainclothes police. His style connects with Dickens, especially the quick, incisive way he delineates each of the characters who fill the book with their distinctive patter, clothes, and habits. Black writes about reading everything he could, and I think he's somewhat deliberate in his expositions. The book is also fairly Romantic - Black's editing out of his personal sexuality, his love of the outdoors, enjoyment of companionship, are 19th-Century sentiments. It reminded me of Brendan Behan's "Borstal Boy," also about incarceration and the criminal life, without the sex - where Behan is fairly obvious in his affections for his cellmates, Black is silent. "You Can't Win" reminded me of "Black Range Tales," another rare personal experience of the real Old West, written by Uncle Jimmy McKenna, a silver prospector who worked and traveled in many of the same places at the same times as Black. McKenna manages to be just as interesting (and romantic) as Black, without the heinous crimes or drug addiction. Black's best quality is his refusal, here, to feel sorry for himself or place blame for his plight on anything but his own choices.

Rating:
Summary: Yeggs, Gay Cats and Bindle Stiffs
Review: Among other things, Black's 1926 autobiography is a dictionary of the gangster-hobo lexicon of the 1880s and 90s. Black and his colleagues blow open safes with "dan," then throw back "mickies of Dr Hall" and eat chicken "mulligans" around campfires at "bum conventions." That is, after they clear out the "gay cats" and "scissor bills."

It's also a thoroughly wonderful read. "You Can't Win" tells the life-story of Jack Black, who at sixteen leaves home heading "westbound in search of adventure," which he finds, along with a band of outlaw friends, frequent stints in jail, and a gripping addiction to opium. Black hypnotized me with his exploits on the road and in prison, tales that are part how-to's on house burglary, part nail-biting crime stories, part insider's critique of the criminal justice system. Black presents a detailed portrait of a bygone American West, where a small-town quaintness juxtaposes with the rough-and-tumble lawlessness of frontier mining culture. It's a time of transition in America, and Black's narrative captures both the innocence and the sophistication. Some scenes I imagined in sepia tones: Black breaks out of rickety jails with a pocketknife and exchanges unreliable paper money for gold. But as Black runs an opium ring from inside a San Francisco prison and orchestrates a mob murder of a double-crossing ex-girlfriend, I realized Black's world has plenty in common with our contemporary one.

Looking a little deeper, though, I had doubts about the reliability of Black as a narrator. I suppose memoirs, autobiographies and histories are by necessity narratives that select and omit details, and assemble countless events into a few hundred pages with a coherent plot and moral. But it's the autobiographer's challenge to win readers to his or her version of the story by eliciting our pathos and gaining our trust. Early in the book, Black succeeds completely. His direct, plain-speaking confessional introduces the ethical code of the Johnson Family, a fraternity of safe-cracking and house-robbing "yeggs" who treat their livelihood as a professional guild. Black's unfaltering commitment to the code and this community won my respect and admiration.

But at some point I became aware of glaring omissions that interrupted the narrative continuity and unseated my wholehearted trust. The book chronicles 35 years of Black's adventures, many of which take place in mining towns, skid-row bars and gambling halls, so it's not terribly surprising how few women characters make an appearance. But his relationship with one who does, Irish Annie, drew my attention to the question of authorial reliability. Annie's a prostitute whom he helps out of jam in Chicago. Later they meet again in Canada and Black lives in her brothel, content to let everyone think he's "Annie's protector and the man about the place," but he denies any sort of romantic relationship. Then Annie surfaces a third time: "a scorned woman" who takes her revenge corroborating a story that puts Black back in jail. Whether or not their relationship was more intimate than Black admits, I began to wonder what key details, what important adventures, didn't make the "autobiography." When Black recounts Annie's murder by a friend of his, he suggests this unnamed member of the Johnson Family decided to kill Annie on his own, an independent retaliation for her breach of the underworld creed. I suspected, however, that Black's role in the crime was more direct, and his storytelling had become less so.

Nonetheless, "You Can't Win" is a captivating and lyrical adventure story. It's written with the pace, diction and style of the best hard-boiled crime novels of its own era. And it has a voyeuristic appeal as powerful as contemporary gangster tales like Monster Kody Scott's "Monster: The Autobiography of an LA Gang Member" or Richard Price's "Clockers." Like "Monster," in fact, "You Can't Win" has the added pleasure of a book that sparks your thinking about narrative devices, truthfulness and the purpose of autobiography.

Rating:
Summary: Yeggs, Gay Cats and Bindle Stiffs
Review: Among other things, Black's 1926 autobiography is a dictionary of the gangster-hobo lexicon of the 1880s and 90s. Black and his colleagues blow open safes with "dan," then throw back "mickies of Dr Hall" and eat chicken "mulligans" around campfires at "bum conventions." That is, after they clear out the "gay cats" and "scissor bills."

It's also a thoroughly wonderful read. "You Can't Win" tells the life-story of Jack Black, who at sixteen leaves home heading "westbound in search of adventure," which he finds, along with a band of outlaw friends, frequent stints in jail, and a gripping addiction to opium. Black hypnotized me with his exploits on the road and in prison, tales that are part how-to's on house burglary, part nail-biting crime stories, part insider's critique of the criminal justice system. Black presents a detailed portrait of a bygone American West, where a small-town quaintness juxtaposes with the rough-and-tumble lawlessness of frontier mining culture. It's a time of transition in America, and Black's narrative captures both the innocence and the sophistication. Some scenes I imagined in sepia tones: Black breaks out of rickety jails with a pocketknife and exchanges unreliable paper money for gold. But as Black runs an opium ring from inside a San Francisco prison and orchestrates a mob murder of a double-crossing ex-girlfriend, I realized Black's world has plenty in common with our contemporary one.

Looking a little deeper, though, I had doubts about the reliability of Black as a narrator. I suppose memoirs, autobiographies and histories are by necessity narratives that select and omit details, and assemble countless events into a few hundred pages with a coherent plot and moral. But it's the autobiographer's challenge to win readers to his or her version of the story by eliciting our pathos and gaining our trust. Early in the book, Black succeeds completely. His direct, plain-speaking confessional introduces the ethical code of the Johnson Family, a fraternity of safe-cracking and house-robbing "yeggs" who treat their livelihood as a professional guild. Black's unfaltering commitment to the code and this community won my respect and admiration.

But at some point I became aware of glaring omissions that interrupted the narrative continuity and unseated my wholehearted trust. The book chronicles 35 years of Black's adventures, many of which take place in mining towns, skid-row bars and gambling halls, so it's not terribly surprising how few women characters make an appearance. But his relationship with one who does, Irish Annie, drew my attention to the question of authorial reliability. Annie's a prostitute whom he helps out of jam in Chicago. Later they meet again in Canada and Black lives in her brothel, content to let everyone think he's "Annie's protector and the man about the place," but he denies any sort of romantic relationship. Then Annie surfaces a third time: "a scorned woman" who takes her revenge corroborating a story that puts Black back in jail. Whether or not their relationship was more intimate than Black admits, I began to wonder what key details, what important adventures, didn't make the "autobiography." When Black recounts Annie's murder by a friend of his, he suggests this unnamed member of the Johnson Family decided to kill Annie on his own, an independent retaliation for her breach of the underworld creed. I suspected, however, that Black's role in the crime was more direct, and his storytelling had become less so.

Nonetheless, "You Can't Win" is a captivating and lyrical adventure story. It's written with the pace, diction and style of the best hard-boiled crime novels of its own era. And it has a voyeuristic appeal as powerful as contemporary gangster tales like Monster Kody Scott's "Monster: The Autobiography of an LA Gang Member" or Richard Price's "Clockers." Like "Monster," in fact, "You Can't Win" has the added pleasure of a book that sparks your thinking about narrative devices, truthfulness and the purpose of autobiography.

Rating:
Summary: Life Changing-No. Impressive & Enlightening-Without a Doubt.
Review: As a high school teacher who embraces and thoroughly enjoys teaching a unit on the Beats, I felt it necessary to read what William S. Burroughs described as his favorite book. What I discovered was something that deserves more than the title "cult classic." I will attempt to limit my description to a few points. First, the book begins in the late 1800's (1870-80ish) when Black is a young boy attending school and ends amidst the depression. You Can't Win provides readers with a true account of this time in America-one that avoids the Mississippi (Twain) and mentions very little of the Roaring 20's (Gatsby), which is something I find truly refreshing. Both teachers of English and American history will find this book beneficial to their understanding of what it was like to live during the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Black's words and writing style reflect the times in American history accordingly. His writing is sparse and to the point-a style that I find realistically refreshing. This language lends itself to one of the high points of the novel-its characters. Salt Chunk Mary, Sanctimonious Kid, and Foot and Half George are just a few of the individuals Black introduces that I will not soon forget. At times humorous, at times sad, at times enlightening, the text is truly a lost classic. As a side note, Black provides many insights into the affect that yeggs/hobos had on the English language, which is something that I find particularly interesting.
Black is a criminal, something he makes no bones. He knows what he did was wrong and makes no excuses. He is just telling his story. This honesty is something that many of the autobiographies I have read seem to lack. Yes, there are portions of the text Black seems to gloss over, but the afterward fills these in nicely. Though Black is a burglar, thief, and convict, he is, nonetheless, a man of his word. By being such he describes an underworld whose moral code (unfortunately) far exceeds our current state of affairs. There was truly an honor among thieves and this is something we all need to learn from. Regardless of his exploits, Black maintains a dignity that carries readers through the text wondering what he will do next and how he will escape the pinch he is in. Never does he paint himself as a direct hero or a villain--he is simply human and, in being so, does things that he knows are wrong but are a necessity to his survival. Finally, this rugged tramp who ultimately ends up writing movies for MGM, provides readers with a variety of life lessons. I filled the first page of the book with over 80 page numbers where great quotes and lessons can be found. I could elaborate on these but as Black taught me, sometimes words don't do justice. You just had to have been there--you had to have the personal experience. And reading You Can't Win is a profound personal experience. You can have your Daniel Quinn and Ishmael, I'll have my Jack Black and You Can't Win.

Rating:
Summary: Life Changing-No. Impressive & Enlightening-Without a Doubt.
Review: As a high school teacher who embraces and thoroughly enjoys teaching a unit on the Beats, I felt it necessary to read what William S. Burroughs described as his favorite book. What I discovered was something that deserves more than the title "cult classic." I will attempt to limit my description to a few points. First, the book begins in the late 1800's (1870-80ish) when Black is a young boy attending school and ends amidst the depression. You Can't Win provides readers with a true account of this time in America-one that avoids the Mississippi (Twain) and mentions very little of the Roaring 20's (Gatsby), which is something I find truly refreshing. Both teachers of English and American history will find this book beneficial to their understanding of what it was like to live during the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Black's words and writing style reflect the times in American history accordingly. His writing is sparse and to the point-a style that I find realistically refreshing. This language lends itself to one of the high points of the novel-its characters. Salt Chunk Mary, Sanctimonious Kid, and Foot and Half George are just a few of the individuals Black introduces that I will not soon forget. At times humorous, at times sad, at times enlightening, the text is truly a lost classic. As a side note, Black provides many insights into the affect that yeggs/hobos had on the English language, which is something that I find particularly interesting.
Black is a criminal, something he makes no bones. He knows what he did was wrong and makes no excuses. He is just telling his story. This honesty is something that many of the autobiographies I have read seem to lack. Yes, there are portions of the text Black seems to gloss over, but the afterward fills these in nicely. Though Black is a burglar, thief, and convict, he is, nonetheless, a man of his word. By being such he describes an underworld whose moral code (unfortunately) far exceeds our current state of affairs. There was truly an honor among thieves and this is something we all need to learn from. Regardless of his exploits, Black maintains a dignity that carries readers through the text wondering what he will do next and how he will escape the pinch he is in. Never does he paint himself as a direct hero or a villain--he is simply human and, in being so, does things that he knows are wrong but are a necessity to his survival. Finally, this rugged tramp who ultimately ends up writing movies for MGM, provides readers with a variety of life lessons. I filled the first page of the book with over 80 page numbers where great quotes and lessons can be found. I could elaborate on these but as Black taught me, sometimes words don't do justice. You just had to have been there--you had to have the personal experience. And reading You Can't Win is a profound personal experience. You can have your Daniel Quinn and Ishmael, I'll have my Jack Black and You Can't Win.

Rating:
Summary: "There are things you should not know." -Pee Wee Herman
Review: I first discovered Jack Black's `You Can't Win', as I suspect many readers did, when I found out that it was William S Burroughs' favourite book. Until I read it, though, I couldn't imagine just how big an influence it was on Burroughs - who drew upon its style, and the code of honour it describes, for the entirety of his writing career.

When you read Burroughs' foreword to this edition of `You Can't Win', it hits you that he didn't (as you might assume with a favourite book) reread the book regularly. Rather, he memorised the book as a boy, and then throughout his life `read' the version memorised in his own mind. Even the passages that Burroughs quotes in the foreword aren't word-for-word precise (I compared them with the text of the book proper), because they've been committed to myth and memory, and are recited in ritualistic fashion.

All of which aside, `You Can't Win' deserves to be known as more than just `the book that inspired Burroughs'. It's written in a plain, unsentimental style which has as much in common with the writing of Charles Bukowski as it does with the Beats - a style of writing which reached its apotheosis with `The Grass Arena', the harrowing autobiography of the British alcoholic vagrant John Healy. (Now, someone should teach a literature class comparing `You Can't Win' and `The Grass Arena' - THAT would be an inspiration.) What these writers have in common is that when you read them, you instantly think: `Now this is good, compelling, uncluttered prose.'

Many of those who have posted reviews below rightly praise Jack Black's memorable language and characterisation, which make `You Can't Win' into a kind of turn-of-the-century lexicon and encyclopaedia of the life of American thieves and hobos. But I was even more struck by Black's remarkable resolve, self-dependency and moral fortitude, and above all his categorical refusal to feel sorry for himself, or to let the reader feel sorry for him.

Three passages in the book in particular, all of which concern prison, are horrific - two passages in which Black is punished by flogging, and an absolutely unbearable passage in which he is tortured in a straitjacket by a sadistic prison warden. If these passages had been written by a lesser writer, I could not bear to read them. But Black takes the reader firmly by the hand, conveys what happened to him, and moves on.

Describing the first flogging: `It would not be fair to the reader for me to attempt a detailed description of this flogging.... If I could go away to some lonely, desolate spot and concentrate deeply enough I might manage to put myself in the flogging master's place and make a better job of reporting the matter. But that would entail a mental strain I hesitate to accept, and I doubt if the result would justify the effort.'

Describing the second flogging: `To make an unpleasant story short, I will say he beat me like a balky horse, and I took it like one - with my ears laid back and my teeth bared. All the philosophy and logic and clear reasoning I had got out of books and meditation in my two years were beaten out of me in 30 seconds, and I went out of that room foolishly hating everything a foot high.'

Describing being tortured in a straitjacket: `Every hour Cochrane came in and asked if I was ready to give up the hop. When I denied having it, he tightened me up some more and went away. The torture became maddening. Some time during the second day I rolled over to the wall and beat my forehead against it trying to knock myself out. Cochrane came in, saw what I was doing, and dragged me back to the middle of the cell. I hadn't strength enough left to roll back to the wall, so I stayed there and suffered.'

Black opens the book with a description of his own face, and fittingly enough, there is a photograph of him near the front of the book. Many times while reading `You Can't Win', I found myself flicking back to look at that careworn, yet amiable face, and picturing Black's exploits in my mind. The afterword to this edition, which outlines Black's life after the book was published, is equally fascinating - I was moved almost to tears to read that he simply vanished in 1932, and was strongly suspected of having tied weights to his feet and thrown himself into New York Harbour.

Of course, `You Can't Win' is a unique and priceless document of a bygone American era. But lest you find yourself feeling nostalgic for this way of life - as readers are prone to feel, whenever they read vivid descriptions of times before they were born, and as William S Burroughs is certainly guilty of feeling in his foreword - Black cautions us against precisely this kind of nostalgia (and ironically, uses an irresistibly romantic description of the past to do so):

`I'm not finding fault with these brave days of jungle music, synthetic liquor, and dimple-kneed maids, and anybody that thinks the world is going to the bowwows because of them ought to think back to San Francisco or any big city of 20 years ago - when train conductors steered suckers against the bunko men; when coppers located "work" for burglars and stalled them while they worked; when pickpockets paid the police so much a day for "exclusive privileges" and had to put a substitute "mob" in their district if they wanted to go out of town to a country fair for a week. Those were the days when there were saloons by the thousand; when the saloonkeeper ordered the police to pinch the Salvation Army for disturbing the peace by singing hymns in the street; when there were race tracks, gambling unrestricted, crooked prize fights; when there were cribs by the mile and hop joints by the score. These things may exist now, but if they do, I don't know where. I knew where they were then, and with plenty of money and leisure I did them all.'

Rating:
Summary: "There are things you should not know." -Pee Wee Herman
Review: I read this book last summer and absolutely loved it. As a student of modern mathematics I was struck by the systemic approach that the author adopted to solving life's problems. The level of criminal sophistication rises on each new page. If one were able to truly generalize the ideas in this tome work would remain an unpleasant memory indefinitely. The part about him going straight in the end was sort of cool too - I guess.

Rating:
Summary: straight jacket
Review: It was everything I hoped it would be and more. They should have that book in every prison library.