Neil White was a successful magazine publisher with a lovely
wife, two beautiful children, a gorgeous home, and an office full of awards. He
was living the high life. What no one knew was that he was sustaining his life
style and his business by kiting checks.
After bank auditors uncovered his scheme, he was convicted of bank fraud
and sent to federal prison.
He was ordered to report to the Federal Medical Center in
Carville, Louisiana. What he didn’t know then was that it was the United States
national leprosarium. People with leprosy were forcibly quarantined at its
remote location on the Mississippi River, beginning in 1894. By the time White
was incarcerated, the number of patients had dwindled due to medical advances
in treating the disease. Since there were hundreds of empty beds, the Bureau of
Prisons transferred federal convicts to the institution. Prisoners lived on one
side of the old Carville Plantation grounds, and patients on the other. They were to
have no contact with one another.
This memoir is about White’s experiences during the year he
spent in Carville. He had been all about appearances, and now he found himself surrounded
with people with deformities and disfigurements, as well as thieves, hoodlums and
other crooks. He decided he would not be
a federal convict; he would pretend
to be an inmate. He pretended to himself that he was an ‘undercover journalist”
doing an expose on why the government decided to experiment with mingling
inmates and lepers.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the expose. As he interacted with inmates and patients,
he learned a lot about people, and a lot about himself. My favorite quote from
the book: “Intimate, prolonged contact, it seemed, made everything commonplace.
Beauty and disfigurement disappeared
with familiarity.”
I really enjoyed this book. It is as much a journal of
self-discovery as a story of a year in prison. It reads much like a novel.
Highly recommend.
352 pages
Pierre, an African penguin who lives at the California
Academy of Sciences, prefers warmer climates.
He loses his feathers and then he can’t swim because he is too cold. His
handler, Pam, designs a neoprene wetsuit that keeps him warm while he is
swimming. His feathers eventually grow back.
