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You Can't Win
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| List Price: | $16.00 |
| Price: | $10.88 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details |
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Average customer review:
Hobo Slang! This is my new favorite book. Jack Black tells his life story as a turn of the century low-life thief, while explaining the terminology of the jungle and the open road.
Product Description
The favorite book of William Burroughs. A journey into the hobo underworld, freight hopping around the still Wild West, becoming a highwayman and member of the yegg (criminal) brotherhood, getting hooked on opium, doing stints in jail or escaping, often with the assistance of crooked cops or judges. Our lost history revived.. With an introduction by Burroughs. A BookSense 77 selection.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #65712 in Books
- Published on: 1999-08
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 279 pages
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Customer Reviews
You Can't Win
My son, who this book was purchased for, enjoyed this book very much. Thank you.
Breaking the Shackles
I thought this was a tip-top book. Blacky's adventures out West and in Canada around the turn of the century were very intruiging. I just wish there were more books written by him and not so much of a mystery of what happened to him later in life. Or maybe that's what makes him so appealing. I agree with several others about the "extras" at the end of the book. Especially his article that appeared in Harpers. That could've have been written today.
You Can't Win Won
A true story about a house burglar in the Twenties who escaped the law by riding the train to another town where he did the same thing again. It's Americana at it's best. Someone ought to write a ballad about this man using his words. "There's a lot of law at the end of a rope." "A hang man may be your only hope." "In a blind alley you shoot and shoot first." "Old grudges are opened. Old hates are revived. Stool pidgeon's beaten and the turn key's denied." "No one is eating the damned hang man's stew." "I never borrowed money I could not pay back."
Hobo's are not derilicts and after you read You Can't Win you may feel the same. It is a great book that admonishes the prison system where there is no cure for the human condition if you put the human in a jail cell.
He ended up working for a library in San Francisco. How he died nobody knows.
