In the early 1990s, Los Angeles was experiencing a surge in carjackings in 1993, a few years before Michael’s attempt, California had passed a law that allowed teenagers to be tried as adults for that crime. Not long after his release, at 29, he was murdered by his girlfriend, whom he had met in prison.Ī mix of biography, family chronicle, and history and sociology of Los Angeles, Cuz peels back the layers that produced Michael’s imprisonment and eventual death. I think all academic work comes out of our underlying worries.” The same worry gave rise, in a much more intimate way, to Allen’s new book, Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A.-the story of her cousin Michael Allen, who went to prison for 11 years for an attempted carjacking he committed at 15. “In some sense,” she says, “all of my academic work has emerged out of things I saw and was worried about as a teenager in Southern California. Allen took him seriously, and a few years later, at the University of Cambridge, wrote a dissertation on that very subject.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |