My background is crowded with robberies, burglaries, and thefts too numerous to recall. All manner of crimes against property. Arrests, trials, acquittals, convictions, escapes. Penitentiaries! I see in the background four of them. County jails, workhouses, city prisons, Mounted Police barracks, dungeons, solitary confinement, bread and water, hanging up, brutal floggings, and the murderous straitjacket. I see hop joints, wine dumps, thieves' resorts, and beggars' hangouts. Crime followed ...

My background is crowded with robberies, burglaries, and thefts too numerous to recall. All manner of crimes against property. Arrests, trials, acquittals, convictions, escapes. Penitentiaries! I see in the background four of them. County jails, workhouses, city prisons, Mounted Police barracks, dungeons, solitary confinement, bread and water, hanging up, brutal floggings, and the murderous straitjacket. I see hop joints, wine dumps, thieves' resorts, and beggars' hangouts. Crime followed ...

A major influence on William S. Burroughs and other Beat writers, this lost classic was written by Jack Black, a drifter and small-time criminal. Born in 1872, Black hit the road at the age of 16 and spent most of his life as a vagabond. In this plain-spoken but colorful 1926 memoir, he recaptures a hobo underworld of the early twentieth century, a time when it was possible to pass anonymously from town to town. Black's firsthand accounts of hopping trains, burglaries, prison, and drug add...

An amazing autobiography of a criminal from a forgotten time in american history. Jack Black was a burgler, safe-cracker, highwayman and petty thief.

You Can’t Win, the beloved memoir of real lowdown Americana by criminal hobo Jack Black, was first published in 1926, then reprinted in 1988 by Adam Parfrey’s Amok Press, featuring an introduction by William S. Burroughs.After its Amok Press edition went out of print, You Can’t Win found popularity once again with the AK Press edition.Feral House’s new version will take this classic American narrative a lot further, including two remarkable nonfiction arti...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.An amazing autobiography of a criminal from a forgotten time in American history. Jack Black was a burglar, safe-cracker, highwayman and petty thief.

Beginning within the hallowed halls of a convent school as a young boy, Jack Black recounts his gradual journey towards a life of crime and his adventures within the lawless underworld as a professional thief, hobo, and member of the notorious "yegg" safecracking brotherhood in the American and Canadian West between the 1880s and 1920s.After its initial appearance as a popular series of articles in the San Francisco Call newspaper, You Can't Win was reissued as a standalone book in...

You Can't Win is the pioneering American criminal underworld memoir written by Jack Black, a burglar, drifter and criminal active in early 1900's America. Black's astonishing accounts of hopping trains, cracking safes, escaping prison cells, and drug addiction offers an unusually vivid portrait of American underworld life over a century ago. Beat legend William S. Burroughs ('Junkie') cited the book as influential in his life and writing.In his striking, d...

The Psychosis of Race offers a unique and detailed account of the psychoanalytic significance of race, and the ongoing impact of racism in contemporary society.Moving beyond the well-trodden assertion that race is a social construction, and working against demands that simply call for more representational equality, The Psychosis of Race explores how the delusions, anxieties, and paranoia that frame our race relations can afford new insights into how we see, think...

Beginning within the hallowed halls of a convent school as a young boy, Jack Black recounts his gradual journey towards a life of crime and his adventures within the lawless underworld as a professional thief, hobo, and member of the notorious "yegg" safecracking brotherhood in the American and Canadian West between the 1880s and 1920s.After its initial appearance as a popular series of articles in the San Francisco Call newspaper, You Can't Win was reissued as a ...

"Much of this book is about loneliness. Yet its pages are bracingly companionable. It is one of the friendliest books ever written. It is a superb piece of autobiography, testimony that cannot be impeached. While it is a statement of an American tragedy, it has laughter, brevity, style; as a book to pass the time away with, it is in a class with the best fiction." — Carl Sandburg, New York World"Nothing half as rewarding has come down the highway of books about thieves, tra...

In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness.By viewing comedy as both a constitutive feature of social interaction and as a necessary requirement in the appraisal of what is often deemed to be ‘politically correct’, this book provides an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to the study of comedy and popular culture. ...