Author: Mikita Brottman
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006238435X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
A riveting account of the two years literary scholar Mikita Brottman spent reading literature with criminals in a maximum-security men’s prison outside Baltimore, and what she learned from them—Orange Is the New Black meets Reading Lolita in Tehran. On sabbatical from teaching literature to undergraduates, and wanting to educate a different kind of student, Mikita Brottman starts a book club with a group of convicts from the Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland. She assigns them ten dark, challenging classics—including Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Poe’s story “The Black Cat,” and Nabokov’s Lolita—books that don’t flinch from evoking the isolation of the human struggle, the pain of conflict, and the cost of transgression. Although Brottman is already familiar with these works, the convicts open them up in completely new ways. Their discussions may “only” be about literature, but for the prisoners, everything is at stake. Gradually, the inmates open up about their lives and families, their disastrous choices, their guilt and loss. Brottman also discovers that life in prison, while monotonous, is never without incident. The book club members struggle with their assigned reading through solitary confinement; on lockdown; in between factory shifts; in the hospital; and in the middle of the chaos of blasting televisions, incessant chatter, and the constant banging of metal doors. Though The Maximum Security Book Club never loses sight of the moral issues raised in the selected reading, it refuses to back away from the unexpected insights offered by the company of these complex, difficult men. It is a compelling, thoughtful analysis of literature—and prison life—like nothing you’ve ever read before.
Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 33
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Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I could never get past the first six or seven pages of Heart of Darkness, a difficult novella published in 1899. I liked the ominous atmosphere, and I was glad to get out. #2 I wanted to be an academic like Lyndall Gordon, who had a love of literature and shaped and framed it. I was surprised and dismayed when she said she didn’t see me in that role. #3 I was not ready for Heart of Darkness when I first read it. It was a book that took me a long time to love. I thought that the men might enjoy the gruesome, disturbing parts of the story, but I never lost sight of the fact that it had taken me a long time to love it. #4 I began the book club by reading a little bit of the background information on Joseph Conrad and his journey upriver in the Congo. I then read a passage from a letter he wrote to his aunt about his health, which was far from good.
Author: Ann Walmsley
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 014319416X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
A daring journalist goes behind bars to explore the redemptive power of books with bikers, bank robbers, and gunmen. An attack in London left Ann Walmsley unable to walk alone down the street, and shook her belief in the fundamental goodness of people. A few years later, when a friend asked her to participate in a bold new venture in a men's medium security prison, Ann had to weigh her curiosity and desire to be of service against her anxiety and fear. But she signed on, and for eighteen months went to a remote building at Collins Bay, meeting a group of heavily tattooed book club members without the presence of guards or security cameras. There was no wine and cheese, no plush furnishings. But a book club on the inside proved to be a place to share ideas and regain a sense of humanity. From The Grapes of Wrath to The Cellist of Sarajevo, Outliers to Infidel, the book discussions became a springboard for frank conversations about loss, anger, redemption, and loneliness. The books changed the men and the men changed Walmsley. Written with compassion and humour, The Prison Book Club is an eye-opening look at inmates and the penal system, and the possibilities of redemption.
Author: Wally Lamb
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1471105342
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 517
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Book Description
Meet Dolores Price. She's thirteen, wise-mouthed but wounded. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the chocolate, crisps and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly up. In his extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch an incredible ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. At once a fragile girl and a hard-edged cynic, so tough to love yet so inimitably loveable, Dolores is as poignantly real as our own imperfections.
Author: Mikita Brottman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781467521970
Category : Historical fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 183
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Book Description
THIRTEEN GIRLS is a casebook that plumbs the annals of "true crime," delivering thirteen bracing stories of murder and its emotional fallout. Each fictionalized narrative is based on a real victim of a serial killer, and each is told from a different perspective -- a mother, a shrink, a cop, a sister -- to reveal the stark afterlife of human carnage. Leveraging the emotional power of personal testimony, Mikita Brottman presents an unblinking psychological portrait of murder, a dark descent that illuminates our cultural obsession with violence and the need for "closure" that persists in the hearts and minds of those who live in its wake. - from back cover.
Author: Mikita Brottman
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1250757452
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
“Mikita Brottman is one of today’s finest practitioners of nonfiction.” —The New York Times Book Review Critically acclaimed author and psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman offers literary true crime writing at its best, taking us into the life of a murderer after his conviction—when most stories end but the defendant's life goes on. On February 21, 1992, 22-year-old Brian Bechtold walked into a police station in Port St. Joe, Florida and confessed that he’d shot and killed his parents in their family home in Silver Spring, Maryland. He said he’d been possessed by the devil. He was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and ruled “not criminally responsible” for the murders on grounds of insanity. But after the trial, where do the "criminally insane" go? Brottman reveals Brian's inner life leading up to the murder, as well as his complicated afterlife in a maximum security psychiatric hospital, where he is neither imprisoned nor free. During his 27 years at the hospital, Brian has tried to escape and been shot by police, and has witnessed three patient-on-patient murders. He’s experienced the drugging of patients beyond recognition, a sadistic system of rewards and punishments, and the short-lived reign of a crazed psychiatrist-turned-stalker. In the tradition of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Couple Found Slain is an insider’s account of life in the underworld of forensic psych wards in America and the forgotten lives of those held there, often indefinitely.
Author: Anthony Ray Hinton
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250124719
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
"A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn't commit"--
Author: Mikita Brottman
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1250169143
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
An Unexplained Death is an obsessive investigation into a mysterious death at the Belvedere—a once-grand hotel—and a poignant, gripping meditation on suicide and voyeurism “The poster is new. I notice it right away, taped to a utility pole. Beneath the word ‘Missing,’ printed in a bold, high-impact font, are two sepia-toned photographs of a man dressed in a bow tie and tux.” Most people would keep walking. Maybe they’d pay a bit closer attention to the local news that evening. Mikita Brottman spent ten years sifting through the details of the missing man’s life and disappearance, and his purported suicide by jumping from the roof of her own apartment building, the Belvedere. As Brottman delves into the murky circumstances surrounding Rey Rivera’s death—which begins to look more and more like a murder—she contemplates the nature of and motives behind suicide, and uncovers a haunting pattern of guests at the Belvedere, when it was still a historic hotel, taking their own lives on the premises. Finally, she fearlessly takes us to the edge of her own morbid curiosity and asks us to consider our own darker impulses and obsessions.
Author: Candice Fox
Publisher: Forge Books
ISBN: 125079885X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
The Chase is a modern The Fugitive with characters only #1 New York Times and Globe and Mail bestselling author Candice Fox can write. “Are you listening, Warden?” “What do you want?” “I want you to let them out.” “Which inmates are we talking about?” “All of them.” With that, the largest manhunt in United States history is on. In response to a hostage situation, more than 600 inmates from the Pronghorn Correctional Facility, including everyone on Death Row, are released into the Nevada Desert. Criminals considered the worst of the worst, monsters with dark, violent pasts, are getting farther away by the second. John Kradle, convicted of murdering his wife and son, is one of the escapees. Now, desperate to discover what really happened that night, Kradle must avoid capture and work quickly to prove his innocence as law enforcement closes in on the fugitives. Death Row Supervisor, and now fugitive-hunter, Celine Osbourne has focused all of her energy on catching Kradle and bringing him back to Death Row. She has very personal reasons for hating him – and she knows exactly where he’s heading... At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Author: Jeff Traylor
Publisher: Drinian Press
ISBN: 9780941467094
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
