Neil White (4)Recensioni

A pretty good memoir. Goodreads: Following conviction for bank fraud, White spent a year in a minimum-security prison in Carville, Louisiana, housed in the last leper colony in mainland America. His fascinating memoir reflects on the sizable group of lepers living alongside the prisoners

In the early 20th century, the federal government established a leper colony at Carville, Louisiana to house patients suffering from Hansen's Disease (which term they prefer to the more stigmatizing term "leperosy"). By the early 1990's, only about 130 patients remained at the facility, and the government started using part of the facility as a federal prison, particularly for prisoners with health issues, since there was an on-site hospital.

The author was convicted of a federal white collar crime relating to check kiting/bank fraud and was sentenced to one year which he spent at Carville. When he arrived he knew little about leperosy other than references to it in the Bible, and that those suffering from the disease were frequently ostracized. At the facility, the powers that be generally tried to keep the patients and the prisoners separate, but because of his job in the cafeteria, the author was able to interact with many of the patients, and came to know the stories of many of them. Some of these stories are sad indeed. Most of the patients were fairly old, and many were taken from their homes when they were only children. Sometimes they were taken forcibly, sometimes their families turned them in. Some never saw their families again, while others had frequent visits.

We also learn a lot about some of the federal prisoners who were incarcerated there, and their stories, including for example that of Jimmy Hoffa's attorney, are very interesting. When they author first arrived, the reader is given the impression that he didn't really think he had done anything too bad to receive his punishment. As time progresses, however, he does come to recognize his crimes, and ponder on ways to turn his life around when he is released. He makes some interesting comparisons between the patients, many of whom are innocent souls but who nevertheless have received a life imprisonment of sorts at Carville, with the actual prisoners, many of who are there for fairly short terms, but who are by no means "innocent."

This was a quick read, and it is not particularly an in depth history of Carville or of Hansen's Disease. I would like to read more on the subject, but this was a good introduction.

3 stars

This was a well written non fiction book about a unique situation. The author Neil White, was convicted of bank fraud-kiting checks- and sentence to 18 months in prison. He serves a year-with good behavior- at a unique prison in Louisiana, that houses non violent offenders, as well as Leprosy patients. The history of the institution named Carville ( as in James Carville's family) and the patients that occupy it was fascinating. The prisoners who are also housed there, were an interesting mix as well, from Jimmy Hoffa's lawyer to a body building medical expert. The author is rather pretentious when he arrives there and unfortunately remains that way for much of his sentence, but through the help of one of the leprosy patients named Ella, begins to see what is really important for him to focus on when he is released from prison. The story is a little sappy, and I am not sure I believe the author really changed his way but the book was still very good.

I have an interest in diseases, life in institutional settings (e.g. orphanages, TB sanatoria, boarding schools), and I am also interested in the workings of our correctional systems, so this was a great combination for me. Federal prisoners, including the author, are confined at Carville, where there are still a few Hansen's disease (leprosy) patients residing.

This was probably a very cathartic experience for the author. Not the most well-written book, but still a fascinating look into a unique environment. Prisoners and lepers could be the next reality tv show...

Fascinating account of the last leper colony in the U.S and the heartbreaking stories of the people who lived there. This is a true story of an ambitious man whose white-collar crimes landed him in the jail co-located with the leper colony.

Meh?

The author reflects on the years he spent incarcerated for bank fraud in a Louisiana prison that also doubled as a colony for leprosy patients and discusses events in his personal and professional life before and after his sentence. (from Library Thing)

This was an interesting story about incarceration especially since it takes place in a leper colony. Although the leprosy patients and prisoners are kept separate, White has no difficulty getting to know several of the patients, against all the rules. Given that the prison and the leper colony are in the same location, it is easy to see how lepers have been treated over the years...hidden from society and treated as prisoners in many cases. very informative and easy-to-read.


Haiku summary

When an affluent man is sent to a minimum security prison for kiting checks, he does not know that the facility is also home to the last leper colony in the U.S. Initially, he is afraid of the leprosy patients, but during his incarceration, he becomes friends with them. There are also some colorful and well-known inmates. This is an enjoyable memoir capturing an interesting period of Louisiana history.½

White does a terrific job of blending a story of his own time in federal prison with that of the other prisoners he gets to know but most importantly with the victims of leprosy who have called them same facility for years--some of them almost their entire lives. White, a journalist, writes in a conversational way and mixes in generous amounts of humor with stories that are both heartbreaking and uplifting.

White does a terrific job of blending a story of his own time in federal prison with that of the other prisoners he gets to know but most importantly with the victims of leprosy who have called them same facility for years--some of them almost their entire lives. White, a journalist, writes in a conversational way and mixes in generous amounts of humor with stories that are both heartbreaking and uplifting.

I have to admit now that I have read In the Sanctuary of Outcasts I can officially say I am bummed I didn't receive this as an Early Review back in 2009. This would have been one of my favorites. Not just one of my favorites, but one of my all-time favorites, for sure.

Confessional: I sometimes skip the author's note. I'll admit it - I'm impatient to get to the heart of the story. afterwards. In this case, for some reason I read every word of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts. I started with the copyright page and I think that's what convinced me to spend time with every word White wanted to utter.

Leprosarium. Never heard the word before. Who know there was a place on the Mississippi River called Carville, a place under one roof for Hansen's disease patients and prison inmates? Neil White certainly hadn't when he entered the community of Carville on May 3rd, 1993 as a convicted felon. He left behind a wife and two small children to serve eighteen months for check kiting. There is humor to White's arrival. His initial observations of Carville are as touching as they are naive. But, the longer he stays within the walls of Carville the more he understands the people around him. They leave a lasting impression and dare I say, change his life.½

It was ok, but not quite what I expected or wanted it to be. It's a memoir of the author's one year prison stint at Carville. Carville is the United States leprosarium which, because of dwindeling patient numbers, is also used as a prison. The book is mainly about the author's change in attitude to life, whereas I would have liked to hear more about the stories of the patients.

Sale book on Kindle. This was interesting. The author was sentenced to prison for check kiting, in Louisiana, and they decided to send prisoners to Carville. They don't seem to have thought it through very well. One idea was to let the residents stay, but section off part of the complex as a prison for non-violent minimum-security prisoners. Another idea was to find a way to move the residents. At the beginning of his term the author was able to talk to the residents & learn their stories. Over time there were some security issues and the inmates and residents were kept apart. The story only goes as deep as the author can go.

This is a story of a normal man who intended success to be his. In attempting to maintain that success, he used deception in his business, but was caught. Sentenced to time in a minimum security facility -- which also was home to a small group of people suffering from leprosy -- the writer finds that their friendship caused him to reflect on his own circumstances.

This was a well written non fiction book about a unique situation. The author Neil White, was convicted of bank fraud-kiting checks- and sentence to 18 months in prison. He serves a year-with good behavior- at a unique prison in Louisiana, that houses non violent offenders, as well as Leprosy patients. The history of the institution named Carville ( as in James Carville's family) and the patients that occupy it was fascinating. The prisoners who are also housed there, were an interesting mix as well, from Jimmy Hoffa's lawyer to a body building medical expert. The author is rather pretentious when he arrives there and unfortunately remains that way for much of his sentence, but through the help of one of the leprosy patients named Ella, begins to see what is really important for him to focus on when he is released from prison. The story is a little sappy, and I am not sure I believe the author really changed his way but the book was still very good.

When I was younger, I read Betty Martin's memoir Miracle at Carville, about life in a leprosy treatment facility in Louisiana (yes, that's the same family as politico James). I think I also read the sequel No One Must Ever Know. Betty Martin is a pseudonym; leprosy had such a stigma that patients used other names, and were often buried with aliases or numbers. Even the word leprosy has its own alternate name: Hansen's disease.

In later years, Carville shared its site with a federal prison. Magazine publisher Neil White was convicted of white-collar crime and sent there in 1993. When I started reading this book about his incarceration, images of sleepy, old, Southern, dignified grounds and buildings that I'd conjured up while reading Martin's books came back. The prison part of his story wasn't especially compelling, but the interaction with the leprosy patients was. I was most grabbed by the story of Ella, an elderly patient who was dropped off at Carville as a child and never saw her family again. Leprosy had quite a stigma. Yet she tooled around in her antique wheelchair, always upbeat, wise and giving.

After release, White managed to rebuild his life in Mississippi and published this book in 2009. I'm not sure I'd want to do business with him (ex-con has more of a stigma to me than leprosy), but I was intrigued by this glimpse into a vanishing world. Carville now houses a museum and camp for at-risk youth. The treatment center has been phased out and only a handful of patients remain.

(Book was requested from LT Early Reviewers, but never arrived. I obtained a Nook copy.)

I am not generally a fan of memoirs so this book was a big surprise. While I didn't much care for the author as a person the book he wrote was a fine one. The author was a convicted thief who spent his time in prison in the last leper colony in the U. S., at Carville, Louisana. And yes, that is the town named for the family to which James Carville, Bill Clinton aide and spokesperson, belongs. In the one year that the author spends in the prison he comes to know the patients and learns much about himself and why he ended up where he did through his contact with them. This is a much more believable memoir than is Glass Castle or any memoir of that ilk. (Why is it that the believeable books aren't mega-hits with mega-readership?) My major problem with this book is that there isn't enough about the disease and it treatment, and too much about the self-centered star of the show - the author. But then perhaps that is the kind of person who writes a memoir? Still it was a worthy read.

If you are looking for a good book discussion title this one is a good one to talk about.½

Hmm... Heard about this book on the radio and/or in a book review. Came across it In several bookstores in Oxford, MS and other places in the south. So I was looking forward to reading this intriguing story to learn more about life with leprosy --- I didn't know it still existed. So, I found the parts that featured the individuals who called Carville their home - those who had been segregated from society because of their illness to be quite compelling. And, I know that either author has thoughts of grandiosity, which is how he came to commit fraud, so I should have been prepared for his somewhat self-serving narrative, especially in the earlier parts of the book. He does aim for redemption by the end, so that part got easier. Overall, most interesting to learn about this hidden society rather than his role in it. But I coommend his eventual honesty and desire to do right. I hope he was able to be successful in that.

An unexpectedly moving (and funny) memoir!

When Neil White was sentenced to Federal Prison in the early 1990's for check kiting, the last place he certainly expected to be incarcerated was in a facility that also served as a community for victims of Hansen's Disease -- leprosy -- many of whom had been quarantined decades earlier and had few or no options for living anywhere else.

White, who enters the place with understandable misgivings and a truckload of hubris, emerges over a year later with a deeply true sense of himself, and of what he must to do rebuild a life that he admittedly wrecked with greed. We are lucky enough to be introduced to a cast of characters that even the best writers of fiction would be hard put to credibly assemble.

While Mr. White does lightly touch on the history of Carville, Louisiana and the medical and religious misunderstandings that led to wholesale quarantine of sufferers of Hansen's disease, he never delves deeply into these areas, and I would recommend John Tayman's masterful history, The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai for those interested in the subject.

My blog post about this book is at this link.

On the surface, Neil White had it all: charming himself with a beauty queen wife, two adorable children, enviable material possessions, owning a successful magazine. But underneath the perfect, wealthy veneer, White was borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. In fact, he was living well beyond his means and was loathe to change his habits so he started kiting checks, courting investors for infusions into the magazine, all while continuing to present an unruffled and untroubled facade to the outside world. But eventually he was caught, convicted of bank fraud, and sentenced to 18 months in a low security prison.

The prison he was sent to was not just any prison though, it was the Federal Medical Center in Carville, Louisiana, an isolated federal prison that also functioned as our national leprosarium and housed some of the last leprosy patients in this country to be isolated and confined because of their disease. The 130 patients lived on one side and the several hundred inmates lived on the other. Their close proximity allowed for one of the most unique prison situations in the country. Patients and prisoners, an ancient order of nuns, health care workers, and prison guards and officials all lived, ate, slept, worshipped and worked cheek by jowl, if a bit uneasily, in this beautiful, serene looking setting.

White was a superficial man, concerned with the appearance of things rather than what was right. He was more worried that people would know that his business was struggling than he was about asking people, including his mother, to pour their life savings into his crumbling enterprise. The first time that he was caught kiting checks, his public persona allowed him to bury the incident and relocate to another city where his misdeeds were unknown and where he would, without guilt, engage in exactly the same behaviour as previously. He seemed to believe that he was a shining star and as such was owed success. Getting caught a second time didn't change his entitlement attitude at all or his overwhelming concern for his image, personally or publically. And this same concern and belief that he was above everyone around him carried with him into prison. Initially horrified that he was going to come into close proximity with the patients (what if he was to contract Hansen's disease too?), he decided that his stay in prison would provide fodder for a book. And obviously it has, if not entirely the way he initially thought.

As White put in his time at Carville, he had to start facing who he was under the skin, learning that appearances mean very little, a truth driven home in this place of refuge and sanctuary for the victims of such a disfiguring disease as Hansen's can be. He meets and becomes friends with an assortment of people from patients to other inmates and he learns from each them as he goes through his sentence. The patients are represented as wise and thoughtful, especially one elderly woman in particular, perhaps because of their long isolation from the greater population. The inmates are a more varied lot, ranging from diabolically genius to narrow-minded and prejudiced. White's focus is more on his personal journey and evolution than on anything else though so the reader follows along as he faces the disintegration of his marriage, his unabating ache to see and hold his children, and the dawning realization that the actions that landed him in prison were not in fact victimless as he had blithely convinced himself in his miasma of selfishness.

The stories of the inmates and the patients were interesting but they weren't nearly as in depth as could have been hoped. And the history of Carville itself was very superficially handled. This is primarily White's story and ostensibly the story of his redemption and change from selfish and self-important to aware and grappling with his own weaknesses. It's a very readable book but as an inspirational memoir, it falls a bit short as there is no real indication of White's evolution into a better, less image conscious, more thoughtful himan being. Not quite as comprehensive about the place and the people who populated it in its final years of operation as billed, this is still a quick and interesting book and an inside look at all we can learn from those we first dismiss.

I found this memoir fascinating but not very rounded. The story of a man's incarceration in a prison that doubled as a home for those afflicted with leprosy was interesting in that I learned much about the disease, how those who suffered from it were treated, and how many misconceptions there are about leprosy. I would have liked to have seen more about how the author took what he learned during his imprisonment and made his post-incarceration life a better one. The book ended when his prison sentence did and other than a brief update, there was nothing to really fill in the fifteen year gap between his release and the book.½

Neil White tells the story of his fall from grace, how he went from being a successful magazine publisher to a criminal. Convicted of check fraud and sentenced to eighteen months in a federal prison, White leaves behind his wife, two young children, and a mountain of debt when he is incarcerated at Carville, Louisiana. He soon learns that this is no ordinary prison. It is actually a leper colony, part of which the Bureau of Prisons has taken over to house white collar criminals. He ends up befriending several of the patients, who prefer the term "Hansen’s Disease" instead of "Leprosy." As he serves his times and reflects on his crimes, he learns the stories of these patients and how they have lived their lives as outcasts. This is a great story about friendship and new beginnings, although the epilogue regrettably does not enlighten the reader about the author's activities in the 15 years since his release from prison.

I'm glad Neil White went to prison so he could write this book. As a young man White always wanted more. More prestige, more money, more flashy things. To maintain an image of success he started check kiting and eventually ended up in Federal prison for it. A resident of New Orleans, he was sent to Carville, La for an 18 month incarceration. He found the prison at Carville wasn't the traditional lockup. Instead it was the former National Leprosarium. And 130 "lepers" still lived at the facility along with federal convicts. This memoir tells the story of White's experience with both. A story of jailhouse redemption like no other.