Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely amazing, an excellent read, very insightful
Review: Probably the best book I've read since Malcolm X. You know its good when you've got 15 people to review it and they all rate it high. This book is very hard to find, so if you get a chance to get your hands on it, then buy it. The first 100 pages, or so, are good, but not as good as the rest of the book. But they are absolutely necessary to understanding the book. The book is very well written and researched. It took me through the full gambit of emotions. I couldn't put it down.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely amazing, an excellent read, very insightful
Review: Probably the best book I've read since Malcolm X. You know its good when you've got 15 people to review it and they all rate it high. This book is very hard to find, so if you get a chance to get your hands on it, then buy it. The first 100 pages, or so, are good, but not as good as the rest of the book. But they are absolutely necessary to understanding the book. The book is very well written and researched. It took me through the full gambit of emotions. I couldn't put it down.
Rating:
Summary: Frightening look at invisible social divide in America
Review: Quite a story of the fine line between violence and brillance. But, Boskett was not the result of the system. If anything it shows how the system will go to great lengths in giving chance after chance. Also, there is capital punishment in New York now. I would like to here from Willie as he ages. Perhaps his view will differ than when he was a young man.
Rating:
Summary: chilling, well researched
Review: The story of the Bosket family is a chilling account of the affect of violence in America, and within a family. The reader is immediately drawn into the Bosket family through the well researched and documented account of the lives of the Bosket family members. We also get an inside look of the workings of juvenile criminal institutions. It is difficult to remain objective while reading this book as the reader learns more about the Bosket family, especially Willie Bosket and his son
Rating:
Summary: Race relationships and the cultural influence of pride
Review: The tradition of violence in America seems to have roots and tentacles. I always wondered why there were so many shoot-em-ups out west. I guess it was just those frustrated code duello hombres from South Carolina. Next, read Cell 2455 Death Row, by Caryl Chessman, to see some of this from the inside-out [albiet Chessman was not a vicious killer].
Rating:
Summary: A must read for all Americans
Review: This book finally says (in an unbiased and well researched fasion) what no one else I have ever read has had the courage to say outloud: That violence in America is attributable to the racism that grew out of the antebellum south. That said, this book has much, much more to say than just that. A vitally important work for anyone who cares about the future of America.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent read: informative, sad and chilling
Review: This book was exceptionally well written and well researched, giving a very detailed account of how violence in the African American community, and primarily in the Bosket family, got its start from the violence that was the norm in South Carolina, where the Boskets came from. The story of Willie's family, his ancestors all the way up to his parents and siblings, is a sobering one that explains how families can be "doomed" when they remain outside of the mainstream and do not have access to opportunity or given any hope. Butterfield does a good job describing the criminal justice system as it relates to children and how we have come to treat 12 and 13 year old children like adults. But what is being done to stop this madness?
Rating:
Summary: Two books in one
Review: This is really two books in one, though they are tied together seamlessly. On the one hand, the book is a fascinating and detailed true crime study of Willie Bosket, New York State's most notorious criminal and considered to be their most violent and dangerous prison inmate. On the other hand it's a study of the origins of violence in America.
Amazingly, the author was able to trace Willie Bosket's ancestry back to his slave ancestors, and in so doing trace the escalating evolution of violence and criminality in each succeeding generation of the Bosket family. The book begins in pre-Revolutionary times with a study of white violence in the region of North Carolina where Willie's ancestors were enslaved. The author persuasively argues that the primary origin of black violence is the tradition of white violence that was transferred to them from their former slave owners.
For those who want to delve even deeper into the origins of this same tradition of violence as it existed with the Scotch-Irish in England and imported by immigrants to America's Southern Highlands in the 17th Century, see "Albion's Seed."
If you saw Zell Miller's keynote address to the Republican Convention, and/or his subsequent interview with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, you saw a perfect example of this tradition of Southern Highlander violence.
This book is a definite page-turner!
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