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9781936364145

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There is a quiet anger that grinds through prison writing. A compulsion to tell the world what goes on inside locked wards, accompanied by the equally powerful sense that anyone willing to look may be suspect. Jerome Gold, who writes of the years he spend working in a Washington state juvenile lockup, describes these feelings with sharp economy in his spare, sometimes devastating new book, In the Spider's Web. Stark realism is the book's greatest strength. In the Spider's Web reads like a diary, rat-ta-ta-tat facts interspersed with passages of sudden eloquence... Honesty...is the most valuable aspect of [Gold's] work. -- The Seattle Times Striking, deeply honest, and sensitively told, this [nonfiction] novel based in real life considers juvenile prisons and all its dramas...the stories Gold relates are often disturbing, but they are beautifully told from a sober and compassionate perspective. -- Foreword Reviews In the Spider's Web takes a penetrating look into the lives of juvenile prisoners caught in their traumatized circumstances and struggling to maintain a semblance of normality. Jerome Gold has transformed his years of experience as a rehab counselor into a riveting narrative, offering insight into a difficult and at times harrowing world. This is a resonant and important book. -- Leonard Chang, author of Triplines and Over the Shoulder In the Spider's Web should be required reading for anyone wanting to understand the shadow world of children's prison. Gold portrays the tragedy of these abused and neglected children's lives with a clear-eyed recognition of their crimes, some of them horrific, along with a deep compassion for the horrors they themselves have suffered. He reveals with simplicity and honesty the day-to-day bureaucratic tensions of a counselor's life, the physical dangers of dealing with damaged children, and the frustration and disappointment when attempts at rehabilitation fail, but also the reward of elation during the small moments of success. There is love here too, and that most eminent of human virtues: the willingness to suffer for the sake of someone else. -- Joanna Catherine Scott, author of An Innocent in the House of the Dead and Child of the South

In the Spider's Web should be required reading for anyone wanting to understand the shadow world of children's prison. Gold portrays the tragedy of these abused and neglected children's lives with a clear-eyed recognition of their crimes, some of them horrific, along with a deep compassion for the horrors they themselves have suffered. He reveals with simplicity and honesty the day-to-day bureaucratic tensions of a counselor's life, the physical dangers of dealing with damaged children, and the frustration and disappointment when attempts at rehabilitation fail, but also the reward of elation during the small moments of success. There is love here too, and that most eminent of human virtues: the willingness to suffer for the sake of someone else. -- Joanna Catherine Scott, author of An Innocent in the House of the Dead and Child of the South In the Spider's Web takes a penetrating look into the lives of juvenile prisoners caught in their traumatized circumstances and struggling to maintain a semblance of normality. Jerome Gold has transformed his years of experience as a rehab counselor into a riveting narrative, offering insight into a difficult and at times harrowing world. This is a resonant and important book. -- Leonard Chang, author of Triplines and Over the Shoulder Striking, deeply honest, and sensitively told, this [nonfiction] novel based in real life considers juvenile prisons and all its dramas...the stories Gold relates are often disturbing, but they are beautifully told from a sober and compassionate perspective. -- Foreword Reviews There is a quiet anger that grinds through prison writing. A compulsion to tell the world what goes on inside locked wards, accompanied by the equally powerful sense that anyone willing to look may be suspect. Jerome Gold, who writes of the years he spend working in a Washington state juvenile lockup, describes these feelings with sharp economy in his spare, sometimes devastating new book, In the Spider's Web. Stark realism is the book's greatest strength. In the Spider's Web reads like a diary, rat-ta-ta-tat facts interspersed with passages of sudden eloquence... Honesty...is the most valuable aspect of [Gold's] work. -- The Seattle Times

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Jerome Gold is the author of fourteen books, including The Moral Life of Soldiers and the memoir, Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility. Russell Banks said about this book: Ive finished reading Jerome Golds terrific book cover to cover without a break Its a powerful and very tenderhearted book without a soupcon of sentimentality. Unforgettable! Mr. Golds novels include Sergeant Dickinson, about which the New York Times Book Review said: [It] belongs on the high, narrow shelf of first-rate fiction about battlefield experience. He has published stories, essays, reviews and poems in Chiron Review, Moon City Review, Fiction Review, Boston Review, Hawaii Review, and other journals.

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