Live from Death Row, published in May 1995, is a collection of memoirs by American death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. Publishers Addison-Wesley gave Abu-Jamal a $30,000 advance for the novel, prompting Maureen Faulkner, the widow of Daniel Faulkner, the Philadelphia Police Officer whom Abu-Jamal was convicted of murdering, to hire a plane to fly over the company's headquarters trailing a banner that read "Addison-Wesley Supports a Cop Killer", an invocation of Pennsylvania's Son of Sam law, and promoted a boycott of Addison-Wesley by the Fraternal Order of Police. Abu-Jamal's essays were finally published after National Public Radio backed out of an agreement, due to pressure from the Fraternal Order of Police and Senator Bob Dole, to broadcast his writings on All Things Considered, an act he referenced with the title of his 2000 book All Things Censored.
Famous quotes containing the words live, death and/or row:
“Ah! I have penetrated to those meadows on the morning of many a first spring day, jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow root, when the wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead, if they had been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. There needs no stronger proof of immortality. All things must live in such a light. O Death, where was thy sting? O Grave, where was thy victory, then?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For death is not the worst, but when one wants to die and is not able even to have that.”
—Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.)
“all afternoon
Their witless offspring flock like piped rats to its siren
Crescendo, and agape on the crumbling ridge
Stand in a row and learn.”
—William Stanley Merwin (b. 1927)