Publisher's Synopsis
This book via Jack London become published under the call of "The Jacket" inside the UK and "The Star Rover" inside the US. A framing story is told in the first man or woman by Darrell Standing, a college professor serving existence imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officers try to interrupt his spirit by means of a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas jacket which may be tightly laced so that it will compress the entire body, inducing angina. Standing discovers the way to withstand the torture through coming into a kind of trance state, in which he walks a number of the stars and experiences quantities of past lives.The jacket itself become without a doubt used at San Quentin on the time and Jack London's descriptions of it were based on interviews with a former convict named Ed Morrell, which is also the name of a character in the novel. For his role within 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 became a frequent visitor at London's Beauty Ranch.This version of the book is annotated.
