Harvard graduates can look forward to many things. But rarely do they get mugged by a former customer from a prison library. Ditching plans to become a rabbi, Avi Steinberg takes a job ゛running the books ゛ at a prison library in Boston. Conscience and sensitive, he tries hard to win the immates' trust and to evade their practiced wiles. He offers literary advice, teaches creative writing and tries to untangle his customers' ruined lives. His book is an impressive account of a world that few readers of this newspaper will recognise.
The prison library is an old place. The idea that reading might lead wrongdoers back to the path of righteousness is deeply embedded in the system, and the right to read by adequate light is a legal stipulation. But for Mr Steinberg's tough prison-warder colleagues it is a distraction, or worse, from the job of keeping their charges under control. Books (especially hardback ones) can become weapons. Remodelled with sticky tape into maces and clubs, their weight and sharp edges can gouge or bludgeon in the hands of those bent on vengence or extortion. The library shelves are a sequence of dead-letter boxes, ideal hiding places for illegal missives between friends (or even lovers), breaching the strict segregation lines between male and female prisoners. Mr Steinberg collects scores of such messages. Some of the best bits of the book are where he repeats the fragments in the fractured vivid prose of those expressing themselves with great urgency but little education.
Mr Steinberg seems aware of the danger of seeming voyeuristic, and balances his cool assessments of clients and colleagues with dollop of self-deprecation. His job at the library, he makes clear, came not as a literary adventure but because he was a neurotic failure at anything else.
Nor is he a tub-thumper. Clearly some of the people he describes don't belong in prison at all： some are more mad or sad than bad. But he leaves it for the reader to draw any conclusions about penal reform in America. He does his best to do favours to those he finds deserving, stretching the bounds of prison rules (always pernickety and sometimes vindictively petty) on occasion, but without any great hope that they will be effective or repaid. When he is mugged by a former book-borrower, who recognises him, he toys with the idea that his assailant will repent of his villainous intent, in witness to the redeeming power of literature. In the event, the man takes his money and jeers in parting that he took some books out of the prison library and never returned them. Mr Steinberg recounts the tale, like much else, in wry, captivating prose.
