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Taming the Beast : Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars
by Edward George
ISBN: 0312209703
Amazon.com
Edward George, who was Charles Manson's prison counselor for eight years
during the late 1970s and early '80s, offers an insider's look at the
creepy cult leader's day-to-day life behind bars. Although Charlie is
literally a graybeard now, he's lost none of his knack for oddball ranting
and dark and compelling personal magnetism. George conveys the riveting
persona of the convicted killer--complex and arcane, by turns violent
and easygoing, and in some ways even sensitive. In one bizarre incident,
Manson, upon discovering a bird's nest outside his cell window, procures
an egg from the nest to protect it from the prison's cleaning crews,
who routinely swept such nests off the building. George stumbles upon
Charlie expectantly warming the egg with his hands, hoping for a hatchling
to emerge. "Charles Manson held that egg in his hands for weeks,
cherishing it, talking to it, waiting for that bird to emerge,"
George writes. "It never did."
The portrait of Manson that emerges from Taming the Beast is largely
one of a defanged, eccentric, and even comical man, a man who goes before
parole boards every few years and, like an actor leaping onstage, performs
for his captive audience, then chuckles about it afterward. Still, the
author is careful to remind readers of the harsher reality of Manson's
past, at one point promising to stick a "shank into that bastard's
black heart" if Manson ever came after his daughter. Though George
struggles mightily to emphasize Charlie's sociopathic nature, it becomes
obvious very early on in the book that he has a fairly big soft spot
for his former charge. Manson, it seems, despite being confined, still
has his infamous powers of persuasion after half a life on ice. --Tjames
Madison
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