Rating: 
Summary: A Terrific Collection of Prison Writing
Review: As a correctional officer, I found this book very helpful in understanding the social structure within the walls of a prison. Having seen alot of the things that this book has, makes you look at their life in a slightly different light. I enjoyed the book very much, and have loaned it to many of my fellow officers.
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Summary: Love Made Visible
Review: For nine years, Robert Gordon routinely ventured into and out of the prisons of Washington state, teaching intensive fiction writing workshops to inmates while the state's prison population doubled and daily prison life became ever harsher. Gordon elicited students' often harrowing stories, some of which he includes in The Funhouse Mirror. They are stories from within prison and from outside lives that were frequently violent, abusive, impoverished, troubled, despairing, drained of hope. Some are fanciful or exaggerated; many have the ring of truth. They are stories we don't usually hear, even when they are told.This is a slim book, but also a riveting, searing, big-hearted book, full of the grim realities and refusal, sometimes, to give in that characterize our American gulag. The American public desperately needs to know those realities. We need them not to absolve people for their crimes, but to put a human face on an often breathtakingly inhuman prison culture, to shine a light on our collective heart of darkness. That heart is shared as much by the rest of us as by the prisoners, guards, and administrators in Gordon's book. One of the many strengths of this volume is that Gordon wrestles repeatedly with the value-laden question of whether it is appropriate to be appalled when inmates who have themselves committed, at least once in their lives, some horrific crime, are in turn subjected to endless years of horrific taxpayer-mandated treatment at the hands of fellow inmates, sadistic guards and administrators, and a fickle but generally vengeful justice system. The fact that Gordon acknowledges these all-too-human conflicts lends that much greater a moral resonance to his book. It helps both his pupils and his readers that Gordon is an exceptionally fine and evocative writer. Too often, in books with political themes, the writing is lousy, leavened only by the value of the information buried in dreadful prose. Not so in the Funhouse Mirror. Gordon uses the beauty of language to expose ugly, invisible truths. If this book were widely read, we'd be a better society for it.
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Summary: Making a Difference: A Writer Works On and In Prisons
Review: From 1989 to 1998, novelist and teacher Robert Ellis Gordon conducted fiction writing workshops in the prisons of Washington state--some of the ugliest regions of one of the most beautiful regions in the U. S. "The Funhouse Mirror," a reflection on and convict-coauthored product of Gordon's prison teaching, both is and does good work. Among its virtues is its evocation of the tortured comminglings of ugliness and beauty--of the metaphorically and literally murderous and the life-affirming and even life-giving--in the lives of men in prison. And this is a virtue because, as Gordon understands, both the ugliness of these lives and their capacity for beauty (perhaps especially that capacity) are things that most of us who have always lived and expect to continue living outside of prisons would prefer not to confront. We'd prefer not to open ourselves to a full emotional encounter with people of exceptional experience, resilience, and insight, charged with vitality and suffering, whom we might admire and learn from but, with good reason, would not want loose in our neighborhood. And we'd prefer not to open ourselves to a full intellectual encounter with the society--our society--that has produced them. "The current discourse on crime and punishment in this country is simplistic, fraught with ignorance, and tinged with hysteria," Gordon writes in his introduction. "One book won't alter this state of affairs, but it's my hope that it will make a small difference." This one does.
Rating:
Summary: A Terrific Collection of Prison Writing
Review: 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.
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Summary: Rare honesty
Review: I urge you to read this book. In the fog of the rhetorical wars about our prison policy, we've lost sight of the basic realities of life behind bars. The chattering classes, both left and right, go on and on about prisons, but, in the main, know next to nothing about what they are really like. In a brisk, well-written account, which includes both his own observations and those of prisoners themselves, Robert Ellis Gordon's Funhouse Mirror gives us window on this alien, strange world. An important, necessary book.
Rating:
Summary: The Funhouse Mirror
Review: Robert Gordon delivers an authentic and disturbingly poignant collection of short stories and essays in his latest book, "The Funhouse Mirror: Reflections on Prison". As an ex-convict, and having read more than my share of the material written about our country's prison system, I can tell you this guy must have really gotten to know his subjects. Gordon, while working as a teacher of creative writing in prisons in the Northwest, peeled back some layers of an underbelly that up to this point only the hopelessly incarcerated knew existed. It's been a long time since I've read something so powerful and so reminiscent of days and nights I'd like to forget.
Rating:
Summary: A Gripping Collection of Prison Stories
Review: The Funhouse Mirror, Robert Gordon's second book, is searing, funny, bitter, passionate and brilliant - a gripping read. Gordon, who taught writing in Washington State prisons for almost a decade, has collected a half dozen works of fiction and non-fiction by his students - including murderers and rapists - and interspersed his own commentary and stories. The inmates' work is stunning on two levels: the technical proficiency of their writing and the combination of brutality and humanity that they contain. The quality of their prose is presumably a tribute to Gordon's skill as a teacher and writer, which is reflected as well in his own essays and fiction. But it is the stories themselves that hold the reader's attention: stories of the countless gross and petty brutalities of prison, told with a clarity and insight that many more accomplished writers lack. Yet these stories brilliantly demonstrate the remarkable survival of basic human instincts in a dehumanizing institution. Gordon's book is ultimately but subtly political: he references only in passing the fact that the educational program that brought him into the prisons was eliminated as part of prison "reform." This is a short book, but one that will haunt you with the profound questions it raises about our prison system.
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Summary: Merging Reflections
Review: This book allows the reader to enter the worlds found in prisons in ways not encountered in other books on the topic. It is truly extraordinary to have the voices of this diverse group all somehow merge together to reflect aspects of our common humanity. I believe this quality in the writing by the prisoners could only happen with the wise guidance of an immensely skilled teacher and understanding person. Robert Gordon must be someone who sees and cares about the lives of others yet does not fall into the trap of becoming overly sentimental about the ironies and cruelties encountered in learning about and working with this group. Gordon manages
to lead the readers on a compelling journey that will expand their knowledge and continue to influence their thinking.
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Summary: Soulful reflections in "The Funhouse Mirror"
Review: 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:
Summary: Soulful reflections in "The Funhouse Mirror"
Review: 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.
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