{ "item_title" : "The Jacket (The Star Rover)", "item_author" : [" Desmond Gahan", "Jack London "], "item_description" : "The Star Rover is a novel by American writer Jack London published in 1915 (published in the United Kingdom as The Jacket). It is a story of reincarnation and lucid dream states. A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called the jacket, a canvas jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body, inducing angina. Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences portions of past lives. I trod interstellar space, exalted by the knowledge that I was bound on vast adventure, where, at the end, I would find all the cosmic formulae and have made clear to me the ultimate secret of the universe. In my hand I carried a long glass wand. It was borne in upon me that with the tip of this wand I must touch each star in passing. And I knew, in all absoluteness, that did I but miss one star I should be precipitated into some unplummeted abyss of unthinkable and eternal punishment and guilt. The jacket was actually used at San Quentin at the time; Jack London's descriptions of it were based on interviews with a former convict named Ed Morrell, which London used as a name for a character in the novel. For his role in the Sontag and Evans gang which robbed the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1890s, Morrell spent fourteen years in California prisons (1894-1908), five of them in solitary confinement. London championed his pardon. After his release, Morrell was a frequent guest at London's Beauty Ranch.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/54/506/320/1545063206_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "8.95", "online_price" : "8.95", "our_price" : "8.95", "club_price" : "8.95", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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