Dead Giveaway

If you want to continue liking Charles Ramsey, do yourself a favor and don’t read Dead Giveaway: The Rescue, Hamburgers, White Folks, and Instant Celebrity . . . What You Saw on TV Doesn’t Begin to Tell the Story. I seriously regret buying and reading Dead Giveaway. Charles Ramsey is the man who did something noble by helping Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight escape their kidnapper’s home.
Unfortunately when Ramsey isn’t rescuing people or doing good deeds, he is a jackass. Dead Giveaway is less than 200 pages. I bought it on July 7th, began reading it the next day and finished it on July 18th. I can usually finish reading a book that size before I’ve even left the store.
If people want to give Ramsey’s Dead Giveaway points for frankness, please feel free, but if it was up to me, I would put Ramsey and Eddie Huang together in a room because they would probably like each other a lot considering their backgrounds as children of privilege who chose a life of crime. Ramsey writes, “I had a roommate, who graduated from John Adams High School in Cleveland. Maurice was from the streets, yet he was as cool as f***. We were two very opposite individuals. He knew where he’d come from, the mean streets of Cleveland, and he knew the consequences that failure would bring. Maurice didn’t want a life hustling’ on the East Side streets: he was focused and made sure he did the right thing. As for me, I didn’t give a shit. The old man always paid for everything, and if I bombed out of school he’d still pay for everything.” pg. 85
Other people may say that Ramsey has changed, but based on his actions after the rescue, he may no longer be a criminal, but he is still a jackass. The fact that Ramsey recognizes it does not make me like him more. I felt this way BEFORE he discussed his political views. Dead Giveaway does not get better as you get deeper into it.
There are maybe ten good pages in the entire book, and those pages focus on the events surrounding the rescue and his advice to victims of domestic violence. Frankly those chapters sound the least like Ramsey so maybe the ghost writer finally stepped in and did his job.