On The DL

Allen M. Hornblum and Edward Anthony

by Dana Henry

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Published: Dec 4, 2007

Mon., Dec. 10, 7 p.m., free, Broad Street Ministry, 320 S. Broad St., 267-735-9600, robinsbookstore.com

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Allen M. Hornblum has long been acquainted with the annals of Philadelphia crime life. His book Confessions of a Second Story Man (an excerpt of which ran as City Paper's May 26, 2005 cover story, "Road Companies, Brutes and Safecrackers") chronicled the Kensington-based K&A Gang's 20-year reign of East Coast burglary.

But before that, he wrote Acres of Skin, which exposed a darker criminal reality, detailing how, from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, prisoners at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison were used as experimental flesh for new drugs and skincare products. Now, in Sentenced to Science: One Black Man's Story of Imprisonment in America (Pennsylvania State University Press, $24.95), the Temple University geography and urban studies professor probes deeper into Holmesburg, focusing on the experiences of former inmate Edward "Butch" Anthony. Though Hornblum spares us none of the graphic details concerning the painful and dangerous tests performed on Anthony and others, he does more than reawaken an especially horrific period in modern science. He also warns how a country that invented basic liberties could actively exploit their most vulnerable population.

Robin's Books will host an event for the release of Sentenced to Science at the Broad Street Ministry. Both Anthony and Hornblum will be on hand to speak and answer questions on the book and the not-so-long-ago American nightmare.

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