A judge who quit, a reality star and a presidential pardon: Chris Young's improbable path to freedom

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Set us as preferred Book ReviewThe Wound is Where the Light Enters: A Memoir of Resilience By Chris Young Little, Brown and Company: 336 pages, $35If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.Chris Young grew up in Clarksville, Tenn., in the direst imaginable circumstances — unimaginable, in fact, to many of us.He never knew his father.His mother was a crack addict with a habit of stabbing her romantic partners.

While his mom was in prison, Young and his older brother, Robert, mostly fended for themselves, often in a home that lacked electricity and running water.Young, tormented by sickle-cell disease, saw many of those closest to him die by homicide or suicide.The two boys weren’t totally bereft.

They had a grandfather, cousins, friends and a stepfather.A neighbor provided showers, until his water bill got too high; another supplied hot meals.

A woman known as Big Mama offered shelter and tough love.But it wasn’t nearly enough.

Desperate for money, the teenage Young — smart, entrepreneurial, dreaming of a rap career — became a gun-toting drug dealer.Young’s searing memoir, “The Wound Is Where the Light Enters,” chronicles this bitter childhood and its devastating consequences.The evocative title is a quotation from the 13th century Persian poet Rumi.Unlike some prison memoirs, this isn’t an innocence story.

But it is no less an indictment of the U.S.justice system — its laws, its courts and its brutal prisons.

“The constant state of heightened agitation and awareness that it takes to survive a single day in a federal penitentiary is enough to drive a man insane,” Young writes.“At every turn, the system is designed to crush your humanity.

You’re an animal in there and are expected to act like one.”But not e...