A compassionate perspective on prison life.
A newly minted librarian discovers the importance of reading for prison inmates.
In 2008, with a fresh degree and few job prospects, Grunenwald (Running with a Police Escort: Tales from the Back of the Pack, 2017) took her first professional position in a men’s minimum security prison in her native Ohio. Although she came to her new job with part-time experience in public libraries and a master’s degree in library and information science, she felt completely unprepared for the restrictive prison environment. “I had neither intended nor set out to become a prison librarian,” she admits, not even fully understanding what a “correctional facility” really entailed. In a forthright, gently told memoir, the author portrays herself as both naïve and well-intentioned as she deals with inmates—mostly serving time for drunken driving charges or drug convictions—for whom a prison library meets a range of needs. Some read local newspapers, some consult law books or, with limited access, LexisNexis; one inmate confesses that he wants to read the books he should have read in high school; a few take the opportunity to hide behind bookshelves to masturbate—one of the many infractions that Grunenwald must report. The library also serves as a place of respite. For inmates who work as library assistants as well as for those who come to read, the library is “a unique pocket of freedom” within the highly regimented and surveilled prison. What Grunenwald encountered on her first day was a huge mess: outdated reference books, mixed-up encyclopedia volumes, inadequate shelving, unprocessed donation books, and two computers for inmate use, one of which was continually broken. In addition, she confronted a plethora of rules that governed inmate behavior, movement, and her own responsibilities. Quickly, she had to establish her authority. “Power in prison is in constant flux,” she notes, with inmates having the power “to inspire fear within the staff.” After 20 months, “tired and burned out,” Grunenwald left for another job, hoping she helped some inmates to develop a real love of books.
A compassionate perspective on prison life.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5107-3706-8
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
