This is a fabulous read, a very
entertaining and exciting memoir of an outlaw. I loved it enormously and I
offered it to Sweetheart as a birthday gift. Any man will love this memoir.
Jack Black has a storytelling talent that keeps us going all the way through
the book’s 470 pages.
Thomas Callaghan, aka Jack Black,
born in 1871, lost his mother young and was entrusted by his father to nuns to
take care of his education. When he leaves the convent, he becomes fascinated
by the criminal underworld about which he devours newspaper articles and
stories. This young man of 14 years of age falls in love with this life on the
margins of society that provides intense freedom.
In this magnificent memoir, Jack
takes us with him on an exciting journey into the underground life where we get
to know hobos, men who cross North America on freight trains. Petty larceny and
arrests for vagrancy end up making him meet the brotherhood of the Johnsons,
thieves with a strict code of honour based on mutual aid and join the ranks of
the yeggs (safe crackers) and other burglars.
A reformed Jack Black became
archivist for a San Francisco newspaper and wrote his memoir of thirty years of
sometimes successful, but far more often aborted crimes, unwavering,
unbreakable friendships and betrayals, addiction to opium, and, of course,
fifteen years in prisons, from Canada to Folsom.