Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian

Description

In the tradition of A. J. Jacobs’s The Year of Living Biblically, a hilarious immersion memoir of one lapsed Orthodox Jew’s stint as a prison librarian. A few years after graduating from Harvard, Avi Steinberg is stumped. While his friends are getting married and get­ting promoted, Steinberg has grown dissatisfied with the insu­larities of his upbringing, from the Orthodox Jewish sense of “chosenness” to his Ivy League education, its secular counter­part. Anxious to shed the ideologies of his background, and seeking direction, Steinberg takes a job as a librarian in a tough Boston prison. He’s about as far from his comfort zone as he can get. Steinberg’s new quarters attract a crowd of quirky regulars seeking connection with the outside world, among them an amiable pimp who solicits Steinberg’s help in writing his memoir, an industrious gangster who dreams of hosting a cooking show titled Thug Sizzle, a tyrannical officer who insti­gates a major altercation over a Post-it note, and an ex-stripper who asks Steinberg to orchestrate a reunion with her estranged son when he unexpectedly shows up behind bars. Over time, Steinberg creates a unique community for these outcasts and forms unlikely personal relationships, which he recounts with heartbreak and humor. His experience leads him to a deeper sense of purpose and turns him into the person that a yeshiva never could. Running the Books is a trenchant exploration of prison culture and a refreshingly entertaining tale of one young man’s earnest attempt to find his place in the world.