You Got Nothing Coming
  • Published: 15 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9780552162715
  • Imprint: Corgi
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

You Got Nothing Coming

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The staggering memoir of a middle-class, middle-aged man who fell into the inferno of the American prison system, and what he had to do to survive

You are convicts. Your job here is to lie, cheat, steal, extort, get tattoos, take drugs, sell drugs, shank and sock each other. Just don't let us catch you - that's our job. We catch you, you got nothin' coming.

It is your worst nightmare. You wake up naked in an eight-by-ten-foot steel cell designated 'Suicide Watch #3'. The cell is real. Jimmy Lerner, former family man and corporate strategic planner, has become a prison 'fish', or green new arrival. Taken to a penitentiary in the Nevada desert to serve a twelve-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter, this previously nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn ends up sharing a claustrophobic cell with Kansas, a hugely muscled skinhead with a swastika tattooed on his neck and a serious set of issues.

You Got Nothing Coming takes us into a corrupt world powered by violence, drugs, rape, fear and racial hatred. With brash, dark humour Jimmy Lerner tells us how the techniques learnt in management seminars have helped him survive in this hostile environment, and how a lethal act of self-defence landed him in this circle of American prison hell in the first place. Bracingly cynical and perceptive, this terrifying story is all truth.
  • Published: 15 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9780552162715
  • Imprint: Corgi
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

About the author

Jimmy Lerner

JIMMY LERNER served in the US army in Panama before gaining an MBA, and worked for eighteen years as a marketing executive and planner for Pacific Bell. In 1998 he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter.. He was released on parole in January 02. This book was written entirely from his cell.

Praise for You Got Nothing Coming

If you've never been slammed, this vic (and fish) Jimmy Lerner will pull your coat. If you have been slammed, he'll remind you of things you've forgotten - and make you laugh. Check it out!

Eddie Bunkler, author of STRAIGHT TIME and NO BEAST SO FIERCE (and 'Mr Black' in RESERVOIR DOGS)

A terrific writer who has produced an unforgettable memoir

Robert Mason, author of CHICKENHAWK

Lerner's white-collar Everyman perspective may force readers to truly see the cruel inequities of our current system . . . hard to put down, even harder to forget.

Kirkus Reviews

'Aiight now. Jimmy Lerner's You Got Nothing Coming will take you to prison, dawg. You'll be kicking it with the woods and the toads, selling wolf tickets to the fish, and sending Cadillacs out for rollies. You'll know what it's like to be about something, even when you down, dawg. And I ain't talking out of the side of my neck. Y'unnerstan what I'm sayin'? Translation: Jimmy Lerner is a terrific writer who has produced an unforgettable memoir'

A magnetic memoir and a compelling addition to the contemporary reporting of life in the American penal system and one man's place in it.

Waterstones Books Quarterly

A considerable achievement . . . Forthrightly pulls back the curtain on a brutal system of punitive penal warehousing.

The Washington Post

A grim and vivid account of life inside the unnamed dehumanising Nevada jail which was Lerner's home between 1998 and 2002, and the events leading up to his imprisonment there . . . A Hardyesque tale of spiralling inevitability towards disaster . . . The mix of characters is extraordinarily rich.

Observer

'Compelling and often screamingly funny...If you enjoyed The Shawshank Redemption, you will enjoy this even more'

Sunday Express

'One of the most compelling true reads you'll ever pick up...Painfully frank, genuinely funny...One read and you'll stay out of trouble for a very, very long time'

FHM

'Lerner deftly juxtaposes his cubicle life with his prison cell life to create a kind of black comedy, giving his story both pathos and charm'

The New York Times

He tells his tale, leading up to why he committed murder in the first place, with extraordinary humour, a raw tension and an ear for dialogue straight from God.

Independent