Friday Book Review: Richard Serrano’s My Grandfather’s Prison
Former Kansas City Times reporter Richard Serrano‘s new book, My Grandfather’s Prison: A Story of Death and Deceit in 1940s Kansas City, never quite lives up to its opening scene. But those first paragraphs are a tough act to follow.
The book opens with a guard at the Municipal Farm, then the Kansas City jail, finding Serrano’s grandfather in solitary confinement dead from a snapped neck. Decades later, Serrano tries to uncover how his grandfather — a drunk with dozens of arrests on record — died in that cell.
From there the historical narrative splits its time between the post-Pendergast Kansas City and Serrano’s present day investigation into the darker side of his family history. This is where the problems start, so let’s start with the good.
The best stuff is almost entirely contained in the sections covering old Kansas City. Some descriptions, like those of lost people living in once-posh sections of town abandoned by the wealthy, make you shake your head at how little has changed. A lot’s been written about Pendergast, but based on what you’ll read here, not nearly enough has been written on how the city fought over any little scrap of power the political boss left behind.
