The Prison Book Club Read Online Free Page B

the book club meeting area, so they and their panic buttons would always be within reach. But it was still a depressing environment. Newly consecrated as a chapel, it was little more than a spartan mid-century school classroom with cinder-block walls painted an institutional shade of sky blue. A wooden cross and altar stood at one end of the room and a few religious books from different faiths filled a bookshelf at the other. The book club had to meet at a time when the chapel was not needed for faith gatherings of Catholics, Anglicans, Wiccans, Jews, Muslims, Rastafarians, Salvation Army or other groups. Like some parts of the prison I’d passed through, the air there smelled of organic decay—sour and fungal—despite its daily cleaning, and the lighting was harsh.
    As I walked in, the men were setting up a circle of metal folding chairs in the centre of the room. Soft furniture was discouraged because it could conceal contraband. As the inmates straggled in from lunch, they poured themselves coffee from a Bunn-type coffee maker and looked around for the store-packaged cookies that Carol bought for each meeting. Home-baked pastries were forbidden because they could contain files, saws and weapons. (A year later I learned that British chef Gordon Ramsay had set up a baking program inside the British prison HMP Brixton, and though the point was primarily to provide work experience and to produce baked goods for sale to outside cafés, some treats were destined for inmate consumption.)
    The volunteer contingent had also changed since my last visit. Derek, a former CBC Radio classical music host, and a neighbour of Carol’s on Amherst Island, had replaced Edward as Carol’s co-facilitator. Derek had been born into the Mennonite faith. The Mennonite Central Committee’s social justice causes include prison visits. He was a natty dresser, with smart leather loafers, tortoiseshell glasses and designer jackets. I could tell that his style would make a big impression on the men. And his sonorous radio voice would be ideal for reading passages of the books aloud, which, in time, he did as a way of introducing the next month’s book.
    That time, I was able to relax enough to absorb the book discussion.We were reading Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, a book that Carol had chosen. Published four years earlier in 2007, it was a feel-good non-fiction account of how Mortenson, a destitute American mountain climber, built schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan through his charity, Central Asia Institute. It and his 2009 sequel, Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan were both New York Times bestsellers, and by the time we sat down to discuss Three Cups of Tea in March of 2011, Mortenson had gained a kind of pop cult status as a humanitarian. The book had become required reading for U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan. U.S. president Barack Obama even donated one hundred thousand dollars of his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winnings to Mortenson’s cause.
    According to his book, Mortenson lost his way while descending K2, the second highest mountain in the world, on the border between Pakistan and China, and wound up in the village of Korphe in northern Pakistan, where the villagers nursed him back to health. In thanks, he promised to return to build a school for the girls in the village. He had seen that boys who were educated tended to migrate to the cities for higher-paying jobs, and he had an idea that educated girls would be more likely to stay in their villages and impart their learning to others. Given that back in the United States, Mortenson lived out of his car for a year in order to save money while trying to raise funds for the school, his focus on helping others really caught my attention, just as it had intrigued thousands of other readers.
    I recognized