Even before opening to the first page, I suspected that an oral history of Rikers would be fraught because of who gets to speak. Would it just be those who suffered? Or would we hear from guards and how they treated people? ... Rikers answers those questions by demonstrating that there is not a single story of the place ... But Rikers is far more than just a collection of the stories of people who have served time there or worked there ... These pages, in their purposeful lack of objectivity and their specificity, become, through the sheer number of maddeningly similar tales, more honest than a piece of scholarship might ever be. The cacophony becomes not the story of any particular person but that of the brick and mortar and barbed wire of a disaster built on a garbage dump ... Unflinching.
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