The Tragedy of True Crime

Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us

By: John J. Lennon

Narrated by: Will Damron

In 2001, John J. Lennon killed a man on a Brooklyn Street. Now he’s a journalist, working from behind bars, trying to make sense of it all.

The Tragedy of True Crime is a first-person journalistic account of the lives of four men who have killed, written by a man who has killed. Lennon entered the New York prison system with a sentence of 28 years to life but after he stepped into a writing workshop at Attica Correctional Facility, his whole life changed. Reporting from the cell block and the prison yard, Lennon challenges our obsession with true crime by telling the full life stories of men now serving time for the lives they took.

These men have completely different backgrounds — Robert Chambers, a preppy Manhattanite turned true crime celebrity; Milton E. Jones, a seventeen-year-old coaxed from burglary into something far darker; and Michael Shane Hale, a gay man caught in a crime of passion — and all are searching to find meaning and redemption behind bars. Lennon’s reporting is intertwined with his own story, from a young man seduced by the infamous gangster culture of New York City to a celebrated prison journalist. The same desire echoes throughout the lives of these four men: to become more than murderers.

A first-of-its-kind book of immersive prison journalism, The Tragedy of True Crime poses fundamental questions about the stories we tell and who gets to tell them. What essential truth do we lose when we don’t consider all that comes before an act of unthinkable violence? And what happens to the convicted after the cell gate locks?

A Macmillan Audio production from Celadon Books

good, worth my time

well done and like his point of view. worth my time and hooked me immediately.

The tragedy of lives lost.

I loved the book and the redemption of John’s life after a senseless killing. The programs inside prisons aimed at rehabilitation are so
Worthwhile.

Excellent!

I will be thinking about this quote for a long, long time. I remember reading somewhere, but the best writing should make you a little uncomfortable, should push you a little outside your comfort zone. This book falls into that category. I highly recommend this book for any book club. There is so much to discuss here.

First person observations of prison life

I thought the book was more observational than insightful. Author fails to explain why he took one road rather than another when his mother sacrificed so much for him.

Not buying it

I tried really hard to like this book. On the face of it, it is competently written and well structured. But halfway through I had to stop listening to what, between the lines, seems to amount to little more than shallow opportunism and smarmy voyeurism. The writer is still vying for street cred after two decades in prison. There is very little wisdom here. I really don’t understand why it made any publication’s list of recommended books.