JOHNSON, Sandy

PERSONAL: Female.

ADDRESSES: Home—508 Union Ave., Knoxville, TN 37902.

CAREER: Writer.

WRITINGS:

The CUPPI (novel), Delacorte Press (New York, NY), 1979.

Walk a Winter Beach, Delacorte Press (New York, NY), 1982.

Against the Law (nonfiction), Bantam (New York, NY), 1986.

(Compiler and author of introductions and notes) The Book of Elders: The Life Stories of Great American Indians, photographs by Dan Budnick, HarperSanFrancisco (San Francisco, CA), 1994.

The Book of Tibetan Elders: Life Stories and Spiritual Wisdom from the Great Spiritual Masters of Tibet, Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 1996.

The Brazilian Healer with the Kitchen Knife and Other Stories of Mystics, Shamans, and Miracle-Makers, Rodale Press (Emmaus, PA), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: Sandy Johnson is a novelist and nonfiction author whose works include a fictionalized account of an actual police investigation, a nonfiction account of a prison escape, and two researches into spiritual wisdom. Her debut novel, The CUPPI, draws its title from an acronym used by the New York City Police Department for Circumstances Undetermined Pending Police Investigation. The novel centers on the mysterious death of a twelve-year-old runaway who had inadvertently become involved with a child pornography and prostitution ring.

Noting that The CUPPI is based on a real case investigated by the New York police, a reviewer in Publishers Weekly praised the novel as "a solid, gripping and utterly realistic first novel" and added that the issues raised by the subject would serve to raise reader awareness of big-city problems. Newgate Callendar in the New York Times Book Review called the book "competent though conventional" and concluded that "what saves the book is the close look it takes at an unsavory side of life." Reviewer Marion Hanscom in Library Journal judged the story "interesting and frightening."

A sensational true story also provided the basis of Against the Law. In this work Johnson traces the events surrounding a prison escape in which a female attorney helped her convicted client flee from jail in Tennessee in March, 1983, and then lived with him in Florida until the pair were apprehended by federal agents in August of that year.

Representing a shift in subject matter and genre, The Book of Elders: The Life Stories of Great American Indians combines transcripts of conversations with Native American elders, with introductory and connective material by Johnson, and photographs by Dan Budnick. Roger Welsch in Western Historical Quarterly called the work "a sort of impressionistic approach to native American spiritualism" and judged its effect "powerful." A follow-up volume, The Book of Tibetan Elders: Life Stories and Spiritual Wisdom from the Great Spiritual Masters of Tibet, presents interviews with Tibetan elders who have been living in exile since the Chinese invasion in 1959.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

Library Journal, October 1, 1979, Marion Hanscom, review of The CUPPI, pp. 2118-2119; June 15, 2003, Mary E. Jones, review of The Brazilian Healer with the Kitchen Knife and Other Stories of Mystics, Shamans, and Miracle-Makers, p. 78.

New York Times Book Review, October 21, 1979, Newgate Callendar, review of The CUPPI, p. 28.

Publishers Weekly, July 2, 1979, review of The CUPPI; pp. 95-96; June 27, 1986, p. 83.

Western Historical Quarterly, summer 1995, Roger Welsch, review of The Book of Elders: The Life Stories of Great American Indians, pp. 233-234.*