* * * * *
_Beating Back._--Al Jennings and Will Irwin. Appleton’s, New York,
1914. Pp. 355.
A most readable narrative of the career of the “famous train robber”,
Al Jennings, who figured in a number of holdups and subsequently in
the Ohio State Prison and the Federal Prison at Leavenworth as inmate,
and still later as candidate for county attorney in Oklahoma, and
now as candidate for Governor of Oklahoma. Will Irwin has edited the
autobiography, and it reads many times better than the old-style “From
Log Cabin to White House” literature, besides being very human, and,
to penologists, more than interesting. Here is a man that, according
to his story, did not start out along criminal lines, but through
force of circumstances and considerable of a temper, swung into crime
in woolly Western days. He was finally caught, imprisoned, underwent
the pretty rigorous penitentiary discipline of Ohio and Kansas, and
discovered the importance of being honest. The tale is as good as a
novel of adventure; more moral than many a didactic screed; and more
just to prison regimes of the older days than many a diatribe of a
narrow-visioned reformer.