The Jacket (or Star Rover) by Jack London
This book by Jack London was published under the name of ”The Jacket” in the UK and ”The Star Rover” in the US. A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called ”the jacket,” a canvas jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body, inducing angina. Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences portions of past lives.The jacket itself was actually used at San Quentin at the time and Jack London’s descriptions of it were based on interviews with a former convict named Ed Morrell, which is also the name of a character in the novel. For his role in the Sontag and Evans gang which robbed the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1890s, Morrell spent fourteen years in California prisons (1894-1908), five of them...
Listen on:
Episodes
Saturday Dec 23, 2023
Friday Dec 22, 2023
Thursday Dec 21, 2023
Wednesday Dec 20, 2023
Tuesday Dec 19, 2023
Monday Dec 18, 2023
Sunday Dec 17, 2023
Saturday Dec 16, 2023
Friday Dec 15, 2023
Thursday Dec 14, 2023