Eye of the Hurricane: My Path from Darkness to Freedom
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a former middleweight prizefighter whose 1967 imprisonment for a triple homicide at a Paterson, New Jersey, bar became a cause célèbre in the 1970s for the likes of Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali, was released from prison in 1985 by a federal judge who cited a conviction predicated on “an appeal to racism rather than reason.” Carter says that his true freedom was actually achieved within prison walls after he chose to focus not on his release but rather on personal transformation through the study of religious and philosophical texts, a process conveyed here with transcendent wisdom if not concision. Carter also discusses his efforts in Canada to secure the release of similarly wrongly convicted people. For more information about Carter, check out Sam Chaiton and Terry Swinton’s Lazarus and the Hurricane (1991) and James Hirsch’s Hurricane (2000). --Alan Moores