Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Great book written by a man living on the edges of American and Canadian society at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century.
A pleasure to read. Tramp Lit. Jack Black. Feral House. This underground sensation, with heretofore unpublished material by the author, will be released as a movie in You Can't Win, the beloved memoir of real lowdown Americana by criminal hobo Jack Black, was first published in , then reprinted in by Adam Parfrey's Amok Press, featuring an introduction by William S.
Feral House's new version will take this classic American narrative a lot further, including two remarkable nonfiction articles by Jack Black written for Harper's Magazine in the s. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem.
Return to Book Page. You Can't Win by Jack Black ,. William S. Burroughs Introduction. You hold in your hands a true lost classic, one of the most legendary cult books every published in America. Jack Black's autobiography was a bestseller and went through five printings in the late 's.
It has led a mostly subterranean existence since then - best known as William S. Burrough's favorite book, one he admitted lifting big chunks of from memory for his first You hold in your hands a true lost classic, one of the most legendary cult books every published in America.
Burrough's favorite book, one he admitted lifting big chunks of from memory for his first novel, Junky. But it's time we got wise to this book, which is in itself a remarkably wise book - and a ripping true saga. It's an amazing journey into the hobo underworld: freight hopping around the still wide open West at the turn of the 20th century, becoming a member of the "yegg" criminal brotherhood and a highwayman, learning the outlaw philosophy from Foot-and-a-half George and the Sanctimonious Kid, getting hooked on opium, passing through hobo jungles, hop joints and penitentiaries.
This is a chunk of the American story entirely left out of the history books - it's a lot richer and stranger than the official version. This new edition also includes an Afterword that tells some of what became of Black after he wore out the outlaw life and washed up in San Francisco, wrote this book and reinvented himself.
Get A Copy. Paperback , pages. Published April 1st by Nabat Books first published More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about You Can't Win , please sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of You Can't Win. This book, newly reissued in a very nice trade paperback edition by Feral House, was first published in , written by Jack Black, a drifter, hobo, small-time criminal, drug addict and jailbird who finally went straight and wound up with a job at a newspaper in San Francisco.
Black left home as a young boy and took to the road. Falling in with other drifters, he was apprenticed in a life of crime that included valuable lessons in casing a job, breaking and entering, cracking safes, fencing stol This book, newly reissued in a very nice trade paperback edition by Feral House, was first published in , written by Jack Black, a drifter, hobo, small-time criminal, drug addict and jailbird who finally went straight and wound up with a job at a newspaper in San Francisco.
Falling in with other drifters, he was apprenticed in a life of crime that included valuable lessons in casing a job, breaking and entering, cracking safes, fencing stolen goods, coping with the law and other such skills. He sometimes operated alone and sometimes with a partner, but he always considered himself an "honorable" thief who would never run out on a bill for his room and who would never think of betraying a friend.
Some of his best lessons were learned in the jails and prisons of the far West, both in the U. Black writes movingly of the conditions he suffered in some prisons, and later in life he would become an advocate of prison reform. For much of his early life, spending time in confinement was simply part of the cost of doing business. He accepted it stoically, but until the very end, he never left prison a "reformed" man. As often as not, it seems, his carefully planned jobs failed for one reason or other.
In one instance, for example, he blew a safe only to use too much explosive. Instead of blowing the door open, the blast blew the door completely off, tipping the heavy safe over on its front side, and sealing the valuables away from Black as surely as if the safe's door had remained intact.
Black had spent a long time planning the job and was extremely depressed when it failed, not to mention virtually broke. A friend offered him a "straight" job washing dishes to tide him over, but Black refused, explaining his philosophy of life as follows: "[T]he thought of working to me was a foreign as the thought of burglary or robbery would be to a settled printer of plumber after ten years at his trade.
I wasn't lazy or indolent. I knew there were lots of easier and safer ways of making a living, but they were the ways of other people, people I didn't know or understand, and didn't want to. I didn't call them suckers or saps because they were different and worked for a living. They represented society.
Society represented law, order, discipline, punishment. Society was a machine geared to grind me to pieces. Society was an enemy. There was a high wall between me and society; a wall reared by myself, maybe--I wasn't sure. Anyway I wasn't going to crawl over the wall and join the enemy just because I had taken a few jolts of hard luck. This experience sets him on the straight and narrow and convinces him that a more enlightened justice system could deter a lot of men from lives of crime, rather than condemning them to such lives.
All in all, this is a very interesting and engrossing tale, and it's nice to know that a new generation of readers will now have a chance to enjoy it. Sep 11, Chrissie rated it liked it Shelves: usa , classics , read , audible-uk , bio , history , canada. This book is written by a reformed criminal known as Jack Black He had been a homeless vagrant, a burglar and a thief, had cracked safes and had been sentenced to a penitentiary five times.
He lived a life of liquor and prostitution and was addicted to both gambling and opium. Details specifying incidents of his life dating from the late s to around , taking place in western USA and Canada, are chronicled in this book.
Exactly how the burglaries, thefts, cracking of safes an This book is written by a reformed criminal known as Jack Black Exactly how the burglaries, thefts, cracking of safes and prison escapes were planned and executed are meticulously described.
How houses to be burglarized are chosen, how that which is stolen is hidden and then sold and how tracks are covered are all here. You could almost classify this as a theft and burglary handbook! It dumbfounds me how deeply people sleep; I am sure if a stranger were in my bedroom I would wake up. Being arrested, interrogated, tried and imprisoned are all covered. Social networking between burglars and train hopping too. Doing time in jails, versus prisons or penitentiaries are compared.
Have YOU ever been straightjacketed? You will find out what that is like here. Finally, declaring that he had never broken his word, Black promised that if helped he would not commit another crime. The message of the book being that trust and kindness breed further trust and kindness, that prisons breed brutality, violence and further criminality. What is advocated is a just and more lenient criminal justice system, humane treatment of prisoners, extended probation and payroll opportunities given to convicts.
I got a bit tired and fed up about hearing how best to commit crimes. This became tedious. We are even told what he recommends doing in a stick-up; he tells us what he did when it happened to him, and he was not bodily injured. I also find it strange that not a word is spoken of regret for the harm he caused others. He seems to have no misgivings.
He states that what he has done is wrong, but he does not analyze his behavior on the basis of moral principles. The book begins with a foreword by William S. Burroughs; it being his favorite book and influential on writers of the Beat Generation. The audiobook is very well narrated by Bernhard Setaro Clark. It is easy to follow, and the words spoken are clear and distinct.
I experienced his life as he experienced it. It is made clear that his life of criminality had become a habit. A person can be stuck in criminality by habit and see no way out! View all 6 comments. It's kind of like a Jimmie Rodgers song in book form; hopping trains, "riding the rods," hobos, gambling, hold-ups, violent deaths, prison, duplicitous backstabbers, tried-and-true pals, pistol-packin' papas and mamas ; it's just about all in there. I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff if it's done well—and this is done very well—so I loved every minute of it.
Some critics have called into question the veracity of Black's "autobiography," but to me it just doesn't matter whether he told the abso It's kind of like a Jimmie Rodgers song in book form; hopping trains, "riding the rods," hobos, gambling, hold-ups, violent deaths, prison, duplicitous backstabbers, tried-and-true pals, pistol-packin' papas and mamas ; it's just about all in there. Some critics have called into question the veracity of Black's "autobiography," but to me it just doesn't matter whether he told the absolute truth as it happened or if there were some "stretchers," as Huck Finn would say, or even if he just made it all up out of whole cloth not bloody likely.
There is truth and value in his words, his prose is clear and true, and the book is both highly entertaining and highly edifying. A vivid portrayal of life in the hobo underworld of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a must-read for lovers of "down and out" literature.
To mark the occasion Feral House is releasing a new edition with illustrations by Joe Coleman and bonus material on July 16, I suppose I'll feel obligated to buy that when it comes out.
View all 3 comments. Jan 04, Hank rated it liked it. I read this book while tramping up and down the East Coast. There were four of us and then there were three of us, our most grizzled and seasoned tramp abandoning us in New York City.
He bummed this book off a girl in Pittsburgh, a girl he got wet without ever touching her. She borrowed the book from a former tramp who has the words "You Can't Win" tattooed on his neck. The book was passed from gentleman to gentleman who each dreamed of hopping trains across America.
Some of us did more than dre I read this book while tramping up and down the East Coast. Some of us did more than dream. Well, one of us. The rest of us just barely got our feet wet. We got our feet wet a lot, and our packs got water-soaked and the book along with them. One friend read it and gave it to the next. He, too, then gave it to the next. But that next one was slow to read, so I nabbed it off of him what do you expect?
It was in many soggy pieces when I got it and it was in a few more when I was done. Pittsburgh to Philly to NYC to Boston, Providence, New Haven and back to New York just in time to go to Richmond, Virginia where we took a gaggle of fellow tramps on a train to Rocky Mount, North Carolina -- and there we met the fourth of our original crew and he took us to Chapel Hill, NC where we all got rip-roaring drunk for four days and then got kicked out of somebody's house.
But this book. Burroughs's favorite we know, we know. For some reason I thought it was about a hobo or a fellow tramp. It's not. It's about a burglar who happens to hop trains. I was disappointed when Jack Black recounted a tale of robbing honest, hard-working hobos of their pay.
0コメント