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Title: The Funhouse Mirror: Reflections on Prison by Robert Ellis Gordon ISBN: 0-87422-198-6 Publisher: Washington State Univ Pr Pub. Date: August, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.72 (25 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Terrific Collection of Prison Writing
Comment: I started reading The Funhouse Mirror up while I was waiting for a connection in an airport. I got so absorbed in it that I almost missed my plane. It is a collection of stories by prisoners in Washington State. Their pieces are remarkable, but what really makes the book are the interspersed commentaries and stories by the editor, Robert Ellis Gordon. Gordon spent several years working in the prison system as a writing teacher, and the prisoners who wrote these stories were his students. While the prisoners' stories are good, Gordon himself is a far more accomplished and vivid writer. Reading Gordon's own pieces really brought home to me the hell that is our prison system, and the difficult moral and emotional problems that it poses. This is a wonderful, gripping, depressing book that I recommend to anyone who wants to learn about what our prisons are really like.
Rating: 5
Summary: Soulful reflections in "The Funhouse Mirror"
Comment: This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the criminal justice system or who believes she/he understands it. Author Robert Ellis Gordon taught creative writing workshops to inmates in the Washington State Corrections System for 9 years. This powerful collection includes non-fiction essays and short stories written by Gordon and some of the incarcerated writers who were Gordon's students. Through stories and essays infused with emotional risk, startling humor, and vivid detail, the collection resonates as a testament to the intimate details of prison life. The collection offers no excuses for criminal behavior, but the inmates' writing reveals haunting histories and the daily combination of terror and tedium that makes up time served. In his own work, Gordon reflects unflinchingly upon the qualities of his students, many of whom are repulsive in their crimes (child molestation, rape, murder). Gordon describes challenging his students to "struggle back to life" by engaging in the vulnerable business of creating literature. And the inmates' work included in "The Funhouse Mirror" demonstrates the transcendent power of artistic opportunity. Gordon challenges the rest of us to examine the true nature of our corrections system and the the lives our society chooses to surrender to incarceration with diminishing hope of redemption.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Daring Refelction
Comment: Unlike most books I read, I was able to meet with the author of The Funhouse Mirror, Robert Ellis Gordon, on a few occasions. He had published his book through Washington State University Press, and a friend of mine was trying top help him distribute it to a wider academic audience. Knowledgeable, soft spoken and generous, Robert gave me a stack of his books on the promise that I would speak to colleagues and instructors in the Massachusetts area while on a 5 week seminar at Amherst College.
It went over well with fellow teachers at the seminar, which happened to be entitled "Crime, Punishment and Politics" and was led by Professor Austin Sarat. The book contains stories and essays by Gordon reflecting on his years spent as a teacher of creative writing in the Washington State prison system. Several other portions of the book contain the writings of his students in that setting as well.
The book is pure honesty. Sometime brutally so. Prison is not a fairy tale, and there is virtually no way the reader cannot be shocked and moved by the straightforward manner in which prisoners discuss their life there. Prison rape, the way in which sex offenders are treated by both other criminals and the state, and the peculiar pecking order society that has formed behind those prison walls, all of which is largely invisible to the rest of us, Gordon and friends make visible in the most meaningful way.
When I recommended it to one of my high school students, I was very clear about what the book entailed, and, though she had been a victim of violent crime, she decided she wanted to read it anyway. It was painful. She had to stop reading it several times to refocus and adjust. But when she had finished, she wrote one of the most brilliantly cathartic journal entries I had ever read. That's the kind of the power this book contains.
We are largely a throwaway society, in material goods, and sometimes, in human beings, and the 2 million Americans currently behind bars get very little consideration from the public at large when it comes to their conditions or future. The Funhouse Mirror doesn't let us forget that. It's not that Gordon is overly sympathetic towards prisoners. As he has publicly admitted, there are many who, quite simply, have to be there; he doesn't want them on the outside with the rest of us. But at the same time, I don't think he believes that prisoners have nothing to contribute to society, or that their ideas aren't worth noting and thinking about. And in that manner, he is one of the few authors who has dared to give them something of a voice outside the walls of thir imprisonment.
We've gone to great pains and expense as a society to incarcerate these individuals, and in the course of our daily lives, not much opportunity or desire to think about them. Robert Gordon's The Funhouse Mirror is that opportunity.
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Title: You Got Nothing Coming: Notes from a Prison Fish by JIMMY A. LERNER ISBN: 0767909186 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 12 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Hot House : Life Inside Leavenworth Prison by Pete Earley ISBN: 0553560239 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 February, 1993 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Behind Bars: Surviving Prison by Jeffrey Ian Ross, Stephen C. Richards ISBN: 0028643518 Publisher: Alpha Books Pub. Date: 07 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing-A PEN American Center Prize Anthology by Bell Gale Chevigny ISBN: 1559705140 Publisher: Arcade Books Pub. Date: 08 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Life in Prison by Stanley "Tookie" Williams, Barbara Cottman Becnel ISBN: 1587170949 Publisher: SeaStar Books Pub. Date: February, 2001 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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