Mind in a Cage

BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ (334 pp.)--Thomas E. Gaddis--Random House ($3.95).

From the window of his cell in Leavenworth federal prison in the early spring of 1920, Robert Stroud watched the building of the gallows on which he was supposed to be hanged for murder. At 19 he had drawn a twelve-year sentence for killing a man who had beaten up his girl friend; while serving out that sentence in Leavenworth, Stroud had stabbed to death a guard who mistreated him. Eight days before Stroud's scheduled execution, President Woodrow Wilson scrawled on a piece of paper: "Commuted to life. W.W."

The nearness of death seems to have had a therapeutic effect on Prisoner Stroud, then 30. Condemned to spend the rest of his life in prison, he made his solitary-confinement cell into a laboratory and himself into a major authority on bird diseases. His story, a wildly improbable triumph of will and intelligence, is compellingly told by Author Gaddis, a California social worker.

Stroud found a nest of newborn sparrows in a prison yard, took them to his lonely cell. The experience of taking care of the birds moved him, and he decided he would like to raise canaries. He painstakingly built a cage out of a soap box, using a razor blade and pieces of bottle glass as tools. Although he had gone to school only as far as the third grade, he now absorbed all that prison libraries could teach him about chemistry, biology, ornithology. Displaying heroic patience, he carried out thousands of experiments with homemade apparatus, found remedies for major bird diseases that had baffled pathologists. His 500-page Digest of the Diseases of Birds, published in 1943, is still widely used.

Though Stroud was eligible for parole in 1936, he stayed behind bars. The reason, apparently, was that proud and querulous Robert Stroud often got prison bureaucrats sorely annoyed at him by insisting on his right to carry on scientific work in his cell. In 1942, exasperated officials put a halt to his researches: they sent him, in handcuffs and leg irons, from Leavenworth to tougher Alcatraz. He is there now, aged 65, still in solitary confinement. He has spent more time in solitary--39 years--than any other federal prisoner in U.S. history.

Birdman of Alcatraz crackles with Author Gaddis' anger at those who helped Robert Stroud set that record. But the book's great merit is that, rather than pity and indignation, it stirs admiration for a fantastic human achievement.

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