This memoir’s energy emanates from Brottman’s sharp understanding of group dynamics and her determination to avoid clichés. She delves into the personal stories of the men she met behind bars, and is clear-eyed both about literature’s powers and its limitations.
The prisoners are real. The fiction classics they read and discuss are real. Honest, engaging, surprising, and often unsettling, THE MAXIMUM SECURITY BOOK CLUB beautifully captures the banal insanity of prison life in America while exploring the power of literature to transform, reform, and illuminate.
Idiosyncratic…poignant… When Brottman writes, she’s a virtuoso: poised and sure-footed, confident and graceful, witty and relaxed.
Take nine convicted felons…Add a well-meaning literary scholar armed only with cheap reprints of challenging books...The resulting dynamic is the subject of Mikita Brottman’s fascinating and unvarnished book about criminals as rough-hewn literary critics. I tore through THE MAXIMUM SECURITY BOOK CLUB.
This memoir’s energy emanates from Brottman’s sharp understanding of group dynamics and her determination to avoid clichés. She delves into the personal stories of the men she met behind bars, and is clear-eyed both about literature’s powers and its limitations.
03/07/2016
For the past three years, Brottman (The Great Grisby), a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, has maintained a book club in which the nine other participants are inmates at Maryland’s Jessup Correctional Institution. In this introspective piece, she recounts a two-year period during which her group (which necessarily has fluctuating membership) covered 10 books, including Heart of Darkness, Lolita, and Macbeth. A self-described “quiet, private, law-abiding type with no criminal record,” she assures readers that “I can’t help but feel a powerful allegiance to those whose lives haven’t worked out so well.” Unfortunately, her position comes across as one of naïveté and privilege; she challenges the men with books she finds dark and fascinating, and is surprised when they are bored or confused. She makes assumptions about prison inmates, only to have her expectations upended time and again. By the end, she confronts reality: “I was not turning them into readers. They were just men who attended the prison book club.” While Brottman has delivered an interesting look at the intersection of prison life and literature, her inability to perceive the flaws in her own perspective weakens the result. Agent: Betsy Lerner, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. (June)
Idiosyncratic…poignant… When Brottman writes, she’s a virtuoso: poised and sure-footed, confident and graceful, witty and relaxed.” — Baltimore Sun
“Charming…In the end, the club shows how reading literature can be a moral project, a workshop open to all.” — Boston Globe
“Readers see more than how criminals respond to literary masterpieces. They also see how the author realigns her own college professor thinking about books she sees anew through the eyes of her tough-minded students. Great literature reassessed in a gritty world far removed from academe’s ivory towers.” — Booklist
“This memoir’s energy emanates from Brottman’s sharp understanding of group dynamics and her determination to avoid clichés. She delves into the personal stories of the men she met behind bars, and is clear-eyed both about literature’s powers and its limitations.” — Los Angeles Times, "4 new nonfiction books not to be missed"
“Take nine convicted felons…Add a well-meaning literary scholar armed only with cheap reprints of challenging books...The resulting dynamic is the subject of Mikita Brottman’s fascinating and unvarnished book about criminals as rough-hewn literary critics. I tore through THE MAXIMUM SECURITY BOOK CLUB.” — Wally Lamb, New York Times bestselling author of WE ARE WATER
“Swiftly and sensitively written…we should all strive to build book clubs with people whose days and life histories are quite different from our own, rather than discussing books mainly with our friends. Until then, there’s Mikita Brottman’s wonderfully witty and deeply honest report from just that sort of space.” — Sheila Heti
“…Steers clear of facile sentimentality. There is no transformation or redemption in Brottmann’s story, only honest moments of encounter…made possible by the act of reading literature. Brottman gives us a candid, unillusioned account of her work behind bars. A brave and admirable book about a brave and admirable project.” — William Deresiewicz, author of EXCELLENT SHEEP: THE MISEDUCATION OF THE AMERICAN ELITE and THE WAY TO A MEANINGFUL LIFE
“One of the best books about teaching I’ve ever read, it is not only lively and engaging from the first page to the last, but dazzles by virtue of its honesty, sympathy and humanity.” — Phillip Lopate
“The prisoners are real. The fiction classics they read and discuss are real. Honest, engaging, surprising, and often unsettling, THE MAXIMUM SECURITY BOOK CLUB beautifully captures the banal insanity of prison life in America while exploring the power of literature to transform, reform, and illuminate.” — Kim Wozencraft, author of RUSH and THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE
One of the best books about teaching I’ve ever read, it is not only lively and engaging from the first page to the last, but dazzles by virtue of its honesty, sympathy and humanity.
Charming…In the end, the club shows how reading literature can be a moral project, a workshop open to all.
…Steers clear of facile sentimentality. There is no transformation or redemption in Brottmann’s story, only honest moments of encounter…made possible by the act of reading literature. Brottman gives us a candid, unillusioned account of her work behind bars. A brave and admirable book about a brave and admirable project.
Readers see more than how criminals respond to literary masterpieces. They also see how the author realigns her own college professor thinking about books she sees anew through the eyes of her tough-minded students. Great literature reassessed in a gritty world far removed from academe’s ivory towers.
Readers see more than how criminals respond to literary masterpieces. They also see how the author realigns her own college professor thinking about books she sees anew through the eyes of her tough-minded students. Great literature reassessed in a gritty world far removed from academe’s ivory towers.
05/01/2016
While on sabbatical from teaching, Brottman (literature, Maryland Inst. Coll. of Art; The Great Grisby) started a book club for nine inmates at Jessup Correctional Institution, MD, a maximum security prison for men. She assigned ten classics including Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, recording their comments about each work. Brottman doesn't make entirely clear what she hoped to pass on from the meetings. Was it to show teachers the no-nonsense approach that the inmates took toward these books which have been discussed in depth by scholars? In her afterword, the author talks about a situation that many people who have worked in prisons have experienced. She met a couple of the men who had been discharged and found that they were different people. While in prison and in her book club they were compliant. This was a way of surviving. But outside, they returned to their own personalities. Brottman concludes by writing, "On the inside, I'd loved those men. But on the outside, I'd lost them." Readers can judge for themselves. VERDICT Recommended for students and employees in the field of corrections and for instructors of literature who are open to new perspectives on the titles Brottman chose. [See Prepub Alert, 12/14/15.]—Frances O. Sandiford, formerly with Green Haven Correctional Facility Lib., Stormville, NY
Just a few years ago, English literature professor Brottman led a book discussion group at Baltimore’s Jessup Correctional Institution. Narrator Beverley Crick recounts Brottman’s observations of prison life, the reading group’s members, correctional officers, and, especially, the discussions of nearly a dozen works taken up by the group. She clearly differentiates Brottman, who is British, as well as black and white men of various ages and personalities, and a few female guards. Brottman confronts her own blinkered assumptions about prisons, race, and the role of literature in life, adding another layer of insightful veracity. As a bonus, the book group’s responses to such widely varying titles as MACBETH, Burroughs’s JUNKIE, and Malcolm Braly’s classic American prison novel, ON THE YARD, may inspire further exploration by the listener. F.M.R.G. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
2016-04-06
Compassionate account of running a literary reading group among convicts at Maryland's Jessup maximum security prison.Psychoanalyst and author Brottman (Humanistic Studies/Maryland Institute Coll. of Art; The Great Grisby: Two Thousand Years of Literary, Royal, Philosophical, and Artistic Dog Lovers and Their Exceptional Animals, 2014, etc.) hypothesizes that her own hardscrabble British childhood left her able to relate to criminal outcasts. "I've long been preoccupied with the lives of people generally considered unworthy of sympathy," she writes. Beginning as a volunteer during her sabbatical, she's kept the reading group going for over three years, despite her concerns that "the compulsion that draws me to these men is less an allegiance than…a form of survivor's guilt." Brottman argues that even dark literary works can salve the desperation of a long prison sentence, and she captures the camaraderie created within the group. Each chapter focuses on the group's reactions to a particular work, while she develops the inmates' personal stories in the context of prison's rigors. Her perspective on her subjects becomes disarming, although several have committed murder and others struggle with mental illness. Brottman's literary selections tend to be bleak and difficult: she began with Heart of Darkness and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and then moved on to transgressive work by Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs. "To them," she writes, "as to [Bukowski stand-in] Henry Chinaski, brutality was a fact of nature." The book group remains a sought-after activity. The author claims that almost "no one dropped out unless they were released or transferred," even as funding for such programs has diminished. Brottman's own literary discussion is thoughtful, but the main appeal is the developing bond with her allegedly unsalvageable students, whose warmth and perceptiveness constantly surprise her. As one observes regarding Poe's "The Black Cat," "they bury us alive without thinking twice about it." Will not appeal to hard-core law-and-order types, but others will find this a brave and empathetic story of how literature brings light into shadows.
