The Maximum Security Book Club

The Maximum Security Book Club
Author :
Publisher : HarperCollins
Total Pages : 195
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780062384355
ISBN-13 : 006238435X
Rating : 4/5 (55 Downloads)

Synopsis The Maximum Security Book Club by : Mikita Brottman

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.

Summary of Mikita Brottman's The Maximum Security Book Club

Summary of Mikita Brottman's The Maximum Security Book Club
Author :
Publisher : Everest Media LLC
Total Pages : 33
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9798350012811
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (11 Downloads)

Synopsis Summary of Mikita Brottman's The Maximum Security Book Club by : Everest Media,

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.

The Prison Book Club

The Prison Book Club
Author :
Publisher : National Geographic Books
Total Pages : 0
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780143194163
ISBN-13 : 014319416X
Rating : 4/5 (63 Downloads)

Synopsis The Prison Book Club by : Ann Walmsley

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.

Thirteen Girls

Thirteen Girls
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 183
Release :
ISBN-10 : 1467521973
ISBN-13 : 9781467521970
Rating : 4/5 (73 Downloads)

Synopsis Thirteen Girls by : Mikita Brottman

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.

Couple Found Slain

Couple Found Slain
Author :
Publisher : Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages : 225
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781250757456
ISBN-13 : 1250757452
Rating : 4/5 (56 Downloads)

Synopsis Couple Found Slain by : Mikita Brottman

“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.

She's Come Undone

She's Come Undone
Author :
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Total Pages : 517
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781471105340
ISBN-13 : 1471105342
Rating : 4/5 (40 Downloads)

Synopsis She's Come Undone by : Wally Lamb

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.

The Sun Does Shine

The Sun Does Shine
Author :
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
Total Pages : 270
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781250124715
ISBN-13 : 1250124719
Rating : 4/5 (15 Downloads)

Synopsis The Sun Does Shine by : Anthony Ray Hinton

"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"--

An Unexplained Death

An Unexplained Death
Author :
Publisher : Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages : 288
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781250169143
ISBN-13 : 1250169143
Rating : 4/5 (43 Downloads)

Synopsis An Unexplained Death by : Mikita Brottman

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.

The Epictetus Club

The Epictetus Club
Author :
Publisher : Drinian Press
Total Pages : 172
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0941467090
ISBN-13 : 9780941467094
Rating : 4/5 (90 Downloads)

Synopsis The Epictetus Club by : Jeff Traylor

Breakout

Breakout
Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages : 474
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781681195377
ISBN-13 : 1681195372
Rating : 4/5 (77 Downloads)

Synopsis Breakout by : Kate Messner

Told in letters, poems, text messages, news stories, and comics--a series of documents Nora collects for the Wolf Creek Community Time Capsule Project--Breakout is a thrilling story that will leave readers thinking about who's really welcome in the places we call home. Nora Tucker is looking forward to summer vacation in Wolf Creek--two months of swimming, popsicles, and brushing up on her journalism skills for the school paper. But when two inmates break out of the town's maximum security prison, everything changes. Doors are locked, helicopters fly over the woods, and police patrol the school grounds. Everyone is on edge, and fear brings out the worst in some people Nora has known her whole life. Even if the inmates are caught, she worries that home might never feel the same. A Mighty Girl Best Book of the Year