Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian
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 a