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    The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men's Prison
    The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men's Prison
    The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men's Prison
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men's Prison

    Written by Mikita Brottman

    Narrated by Beverley A. Crick

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJun 7, 2016
    ISBN9780062566041
    Author

    Mikita Brottman

    Mikita Brottman, PhD, is an Oxford-educated scholar, author, and psychoanalyst. She has written seven previous books, including The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Literary, Royal, Philosophical, and Artistic Dog Lovers and Their Exceptional Animals, and is a professor of humanities at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and continues with her weekly reading group at Jessup Correctional Institution.

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    Reviews for The Maximum Security Book Club

    3.5/5

    37 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      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.

      I felt it was not enough; I wanted more depth, but still, a few moments really stood out to me.

      discussion of Lolita by Nobokov, Poe and people changing once released from prison
    • 4/5
      Really enjoyed the book. Really liked her descriptions of the prison, the convicts, the guards - and also her comments about the books themselves and most of all her reactions to it all. A very good writer!
    • 3/5
      Outside of America’s political system, the misnamed “Criminal Justice System” is the nation’s most broken institution. In aggregate, states and the federal government spend upwards of $100 billion each year to punish people who have broken laws and call the punishment “rehabilitation” or “correction.” Any institution with an 82% failure rate such as the incarceration system does simply is not working.
      Brottman’s book traces her experience inside on of these institutions. She meets with nine convicts regularly to read and discuss great books. Along the way, she tells about their lives, their backgrounds,their crimes and the hopelessness that she sees inside the walls of this system of cages. Yet she also chronicles the resilience and hope some men are capable of.
      The book is an insightful look into the system and its impact on its victims, for to call these convicts anything else dismisses their realities. The author gains insights into the books she shares with these men that often amaze her and sometimes even raise her to higher levels of her own understanding of the books.
      It is a worthwhile read both for its actual content and for its implications. Since every single other nation of the world has both lower incarceration rates and lower recidivity rates, it is also an indictment of a society that fails to correct a system that wastes billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives rich in human capital.
    • 3/5
      Mikita Brottman’s The Maximum Security Book Club recounts the author’s experiences in running a book club inside Maryland’s Jessup Correctional Institution for three years. During those years, the club membership was capped at nine prisoners plus Brottman, with the membership slowly evolving over time as prisoners were released or dropped out of the club for other reasons such as medical problems. Brottman, who is British, begins the book with a description of her upbringing by parents “with little respect for the law.” Both her parents began their adult lives as teachers, a job her father would suffer for twenty years while fighting the system from within. Her mother was more quickly “radicalized and enlightened,” eventually even to joining the local Communist Party. Brottman, as a result, says that she has long been fascinated by people considered by society to be unworthy of inclusion. But whether or not she would ever admit it, Brottman was naïve about prison life and prisoners when she began the book club, and only a little less naïve about it all after running the club for three years.Most of the men who joined the book club saw it as an escape from the monotony of their daily lives, a place where they could relax in a peaceful setting and converse with fellow prisoners (of different races, gang affiliations, etc.) in a manner they could do in no other part of the prison setting. With perhaps two or three exceptions, most of these men could barely read, yet Brottman somehow increased their reading skills by handing them a reading list that some colleges might envy. Over a three year period, the book club read and discussed these ten works:1.Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)2.“Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (Herman Melville)3.Ham on Rye (Charles Bukowski)4.Junkie (William S. Burroughs)5.On the Yard ( Malcolm Braly)6.Macbeth (William Shakespeare)7.Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Lewis Stevenson)8.“The Black Cat” (Edgar Allan Poe)9.The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)10.Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov) Brottman hoped that the group would relate to her literary choices, and they often did, especially when the book or story related to their own experiences (Ham on Rye, Junkie, On the Yard, etc.) or dealt with topics such as murder and betrayal (“The Black Cat, Macbeth, etc.). But her shock at the prisoners’ unanimous disgust with the protagonist of Lolita only illustrates her naiveté when it comes to understanding the mindset of the men she was trying to help.The Maximum Security Book Club is interesting despite, and because of, the missteps that Brottman inadvertently reveals about how she ran the prison book club from month to month. Her decision to make Lolita a book club selection is only one example of what she did wrong. The author also allowed herself to believe that the men she worked with always behaved the way they behaved in her classroom, and this led her to a dangerous bending of the common sense rules that were in place for her protection. She became particularly close to two or three of the prisoners, even to giving them her personal email address and phone number and loaning them money after their release. And, perhaps because of her childhood, she often saw the prison staff as her enemy rather than as a group of people there to keep her and the inmates safe. But the prison book club has to be considered a success because it raised the reading comprehension skills of the overall group, increased the self-confidence of the prisoners who took it seriously, and eased the monotony of their time in prison. Bottom Line: The Maximum Security Book Club offers an interesting look at a group of men in a setting in which one would least expect to find them. Brottman does a good job introducing the members of the club to the reader and letting them be themselves – even if she sometimes fails to recognize exactly who they are when they leave her classroom.
    • 5/5
      The author is a lit professor who brings her favorite books to share with a group of men in longterm lockup in Jessup, MD. The story is as much about her own misconceptions about the men and how their prison lives work as it as about the books. Mikita herself is hardly your average do-gooder; she's prickly and impatient and jealous when another prison classroom seems to be having more fun than hers. I really question her choices in authors; Edgar Allen Poe, Joseph Conrad, William S. Burroughs, and not only because there are no women authors. She seems to have picked the thickest, most difficult texts, and then is surprised when the group hates the books and the characters. I must admit, though, that the narrative IS like a lit class, and I enjoyed her analysis of the texts. However, couldn't she have added Toni Morrison? Or PG Wodehouse? Alice Walker? Or anything that would give these lifer a bit of lightness? Or anything written in the last 50 years?
    • 4/5
      Professor and psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman recounts her experiences leading nine inmates in a book club/reading group at Jessup Correctional Institution. Her reading assignments: Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener', Bukowski's 'Ham on Rye', Burrough's 'Junkie', Braly's 'On the Yard', Shakespeare's 'MacBeth', Stevenson's 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde', Poe's 'The Black Cat', Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis ', and Nabokov's 'Lolita'. Each book receives a chapter, including Brottman's own experience with the book, her reasons for choosing it, and the discussion that ensued. Many of her choices seem very dark and challenging, until you learn of her own hardscrabble upbringing. It was a delight to go back and revisit some old favorites, as well as discover some new 'must-reads.' A favorite question of authors is "What book would you most like to experience as if for the very first time?" In "Maximum Security Book Club" it was a treat to see these classics through fresh and unique perspectives. It surprised me that Brottman herself was so surprised whe her group was able to read carefully and critically. Her selections for the group seem to have been a mix of her own particular tastes as well as a certain pre-conceived notion as to what would be thought provoking. She did elicit strong opinions, but often not in the ways she had anticipated, most especially with 'Lolita'. This was an instance in which the pupils had much to teach their instructor -- and quite rightly.Along the way, we meet and engage with the men who make up this group. They all are serving hard time for horrible crimes. That they are both capable of great violence and yet, at times, great insight is one of the more powerful aspects of the book. Some might feel 'Prisoners Are People Too' a mere platitude. Others will clutch to a need to dehumanize and vilify. As a former prosecutor, I have seen true evil and understand society's need for justice, retribution and protection. Yet the fact remains: American jails have swollen beyond the level of any other civilized nation. Many of those who populate our prisons will be released and returned to society. Their successful assimilation is the best for us all. Recognizing our common humanity goes a long way along that score.