From Library Journal
Jackson gained notoriety shortly before his death in 1970 when his younger brother unsuccessfully tried to free him at gunpoint when Jackson and two others were on trial for killing a guard. Written between 1964 and 1970 while serving time in Soledad Prison for robbery, the letters reveal the brutality and racism faced by prisoners and call for unity among African Americans. This edition contains a new foreword by Jackson's nephew Jonathan. Soledad Brother remains "recommended for most libraries" (LJ 12/15/70) and is a solid title for Black History Month in February.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

Jackson gained notoriety shortly before his death in 1970 when his younger brother unsuccessfully tried to free him at gunpoint when Jackson and two others were on trial for killing a guard. Written between 1964 and 1970 while serving time in Soledad Prison for robbery, the letters reveal the brutality and racism faced by prisoners and call for unity among African Americans. This edition contains a new foreword by Jackson's nephew Jonathan. Soledad Brother remains "recommended for most libraries" (LJ 12/15/70) and is a solid title for Black History Month in February.

Sacred Fire

That prisons have long been a means of containing black male self-assertiveness and anger is a self-evident truth to a large number of African Americans. George Jackson's Soledad Brother gives testament to this, as well as to the reality of the enormous power, talent, and intelligence being restrained behind bars. A collection of Jackson's letters from prison, Soledad Brother is an outspoken condemnation of the racism of white America and a powerful appraisal of the prison system that fuiled to break his spirit but eventually took his life.

At eighteen, Jackson was given a one-year-to-life sentence for stealing $70 from a gas station. In prison Jackson became radicalized and, together with another prisoner, started a Marxist revolutionary cell. Through a series of events, Jackson would be charged with the murder of a white prison guard and would subsequently be killed while allegedly trying to escape—despite the fact that all charges against him had been dropped. At Jackson's death, he was thirty years old. Twelve of those thirty years had been spent in prison, seven and one-half of those years in solitary confinement.