Tag: books

Five stories that changed my life

Author: | 20 Feb 2024

While serving a long sentence, Longford scholar Kieron devoted his energies to reading and studying. He wanted to be in a better position on release and have more opportunities than before. He is now studying at university for a MA and here he shares some thoughts and book recommendations on how to turn your life around.

In prison one of the things that motivated me most was learning about the stories of people in the same situation as I was back then, people who had started from even more adverse and or impoverished positions than I had, and yet were still able to achieve seemingly impossible successes. That is one of the key insights I’d like to share here because I found these stories empowering. They allowed me to think big and to nullify any self-imposed barriers, excuses or a lack of self-confidence.

I also found reading about black history (pre-the transatlantic slave trade) incredibly beneficial to my transformation. Learning about the inspiring cultures, inventions, great kingdoms and empires across Africa helped shift any inferiority complex I had allowed to flourish by not taking on board this history in my pre-prison education.

Thinking Skills

Reading and studying enabled me to understand the different way things are framed, and what effect this can have on you. It meant I could then identify the root causes of my previous mentality and recognise actions and behaviours in myself that were counterproductive to my newly formed long-term goals.

Such clarity of thinking has led me to formulate strategies to make fundamental and positive changes to who I am, and to overcome the circumstances that led me to committing the offence for which I was jailed. That doesn’t mean, though, I am making excuses for my behaviour. I still take full responsibility for my actions.

Learning Curve

Aside from reading a lot of books, I used my time in prison to complete over 30 educational and vocational courses, from restorative justice through Shannon Trust and construction skills to book-keeping. And everything in between. During the process, I learnt the satisfaction to be found on such a journey and how to celebrate small wins, like completing an assignment or finishing a book. I have experienced the positive feelings you get from achieving something on your own merit rather than seeking short-term, quick fixes.

Helping hands

Since being released all that hard work has been paying off in abundance and I am able to enjoy the little things in life I have missed. I am no longer afraid, or too proud, to ask for help to take advantage of opportunities whilst creating even more. Having completed a university degree whilst serving my sentence, I have now started with Longford Trust support a Masters in innovation management and entrepreneurship at Middlesex University. I am networking and seeking guidance and support for all the projects I am working on and will see through to fruition.

 

If like Kieron you too are hungry for relevant and reusable information on changing the course of your life, here he shares his top five life-changing reads.

(1) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R Covey (Simon & Schuster, £11.95)

This book helped me to have a fundamental and rapid change in mentality, which then allowed me to rearrange my priorities.  My favourite line in it reads: ‘Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.’ Paradigm, prism, or lens describe the perspective though which we view the everyday events in our lives. Awareness of how our minds process input information enables us to create positive and productive output or actions.

(2) Opening Doors: How Daring to Ask For Help Changed My Life (And Will Change Yours Too) by Reggie Nelson (Blink, £12.79)

Pride and ego often got in my way and stopped me asking for help, even when I knew it was available. Wanting to feel independent and to receive full credit for achievements are natural feelings, but we need to understand that everyone one who achieved the things we aspire to achieve received help in some way, shape or form. Asking for help is a necessity not a weakness.

(3) Grit: Why Passion and Resilience Are The Secrets of Success by Angela Duckworth (Vermilion, £9.99)

This book gave me insight into the determining factors for success. Surprisingly they come down to grit and determination. Your drive and commitment outweigh your natural talent, resources, environment or support when it comes to predicting your success.  Best line: ‘The most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary’.

(4) Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (Vermilion, £10.95)

‘Poverty,’, Napoleon Hill writes, ‘is attracted to the one whose mind is favourable to it, just as money is attracted to the one whose mind has been deliberately prepared to attract it.’  This book provides insights into how do people with money think about money that allows them to accumulate it whilst others don’t.

(5) Awaken the Giant Within: How To Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Life by Anthony Robbins (Simon & Schuster, £6.99)

Consider a scenario where you’re heading to a job interview, and your car’s tyre bursts on the way. If you vent to a friend using words like ‘angry’, ‘devastated’, ‘frustrated’ or ‘stressed out’, they will trigger negative emotions, putting you in a bad mood.  In Anthony Robbins’ chapter on ‘The Vocabulary of Ultimate Success’, he encourages us instead to choose our words carefully and tailor them to the situation. For example, in the same scenario, you can use words like ‘disenchanted’, ‘delayed’, or view it as a ‘minor hurdle’ and an opportunity to look after your car better. This perspective shift is essential because the situation could have been much worse. ‘Words,’ he writes, ‘cannot only create emotions, they create actions. And from our actions flow the results of our lives’.

Why You Can’t Better A Christmas Book

Author: | 15 Dec 2022

If you’ve got a spare moment this festive season, for Longford Blog former scholar Dempsey tells his story of prison, Christmas, books and their power to transport us wherever we find ourselves

A supermoon shining older and colder than superstition cast a wintry light over London while the world hurried over cobblestoned streets to the seasonal sound of bells.  Gleaming brass bells ringing hopefully and insistently in the white-gloved hands of the streetcorner Santa.

From high-end boutiques dressed up and down and all around in silver and gold, from the gap-toothed vendor selling bourbon-laced eggnog with candy cane straws, to the young and old church group singing “We Three Kings” beneath a Victorian-era lamppost, make no mistake about it, Christmas time was here.  Here holding the candle of religion in one hand, here bearing the torch of commercialization in the other.  “Ring-a-ling, hear them ring, soon it will be Christmas Day.”

A venerable smell

I was headed toward Hatchards, a Piccadilly bookshop that has been doing business in greater London since the 1700s.  I walked into the carpeted shop and over to a vintage end-table neatly stacked with contemporary works of fiction.  On an adjacent end-table were books of military history.

Surveying the shop as if I were about to rent a room, I could sense its comfort had been earned rather than given.  The place looks venerable, smells venerable and, with its glossy mahogany tables, ornate banisters, and green-shade bankers’ lamps, feels venerable.

I found the section with the works of Charles Dickens in paper- and hardback resting on high shelves and long tables. Taking David Copperfield in hand, I sat down on a well-worn burgundy leather Chesterfield that felt like the ne plus ultra of comfort.  While I reread the first page of the classic for the first time in a long time, an orchestral rendition of “Carol of the Bells” stole through the entrance whenever someone entered or left.  I felt a deep sense of belonging in that bookshop, a supreme contentment created by the holiday season, antiquated atmosphere, and the ghosts of all those Dickens characters floating from stories of the long ago.

Novels that sustain

I didn’t always have the luxury of visiting an elegant bookshop in a cosmopolitan city because I had been in prison for most of my life.  Been right behind the looming concrete walls of a prison in a part of New York State that stayed cloudy, stayed dreary, stayed brutally unsympathetic and impersonal, but most of all, simply stayed.

I was occasionally asked how I did my time.  How I served a lengthy sentence without breaking down and dissolving into the earth.  I invariably replied that I was saved by the novel, spared the destruction of imprisonment because of the novel’s ability to transport the mind, reroute and redirect thought and feeling.

The novel can entertain as much as it can sustain.  Books also shore up the abiding loneliness of imprisonment.  Lessen the sting of prolonged banishment.

In prison books are my world

A large part of life consists of the people who come and go from your life.  Some people you don’t mind never seeing again, others you do.  Books, their characters and the stories they tell become your friends.  Friends who remain.  Important and towering allies in an often cold and alienating world.

In prison books were of paramount importance to me.  When I was young, I felt that my friends were my world.  In prison my books were my world.  They were fulfilling and reliable and if I’ve yet to fully express what the novel has meant to me and can mean to anyone, I’ll offer up the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald: “That is part of the beauty of all literature.  You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone.  You belong.”

The friendship of books

Author: | 19 Jul 2021

The books which got me through.

Here for Longford Blog ex-scholar Dempsey shares his reading list of inspirational books which helped him to survive prison and remain ‘friends’ to this day.

Since books are about stories, let me first of all, briefly, tell you about me. Briefly I promise! I went to prison at 18 and came out at 57. Almost four decades behind prison walls.  Books truly were my salvation and inspiration during those years of imprisonment.

In darker moments, as I moved through the ages of man, the stories and the people in them offered not only company, but self-education and ultimately rehabilitation.

Perhaps this may be something others who’ve turned to books for for solace and escapism in the pandemic will recognise.

After my release in 2017 I was lucky enough to continue studying literature in an academic setting, thanks to the Longford Trust. So I want to share some observations of three pivotal books that stay forever with me. I hope what I have to say will strike a chord as much for those who have never stepped inside a prison as those who have been incarcerated.

One of the most influential books I read is an adventure upon the high seas titled Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.

For those unfamiliar with the story, Moby-Dick is a big, adventurous book that explores themes as profound as evil, religion, destiny, insanity, and race.  The themes are considered and examined through the eyes of Ishmael, a young man who decides to see a bit of the world by joining a whaling expedition.  Captain Ahab leads the search for a white sperm whale who bit off his leg and it is here, in Ahab’s monomaniacal desire to have his day with Moby-Dick, that the story gives rise to its major themes.  Ishmael views his time spent aboard the Pequod whaling ship as an education comparable to a tenure at Harvard or Yale, and his education grows during various incidents such as when he finds himself below deck staring into the ship’s tryworks, and after almost losing control of the ship he’s supposed to be above deck steering, Ishmael reflects: “…do not give thyself up to fire, least it invert thee, deaden thee, as for a time it did me…”   And how many times in our lives have we all, in some form or manner, become undermined by staring too long into the blast furnace of existence.

Another book I found that lessened the sting of incarceration is a classic story of adventure and misadventure that was written—perhaps by feather and ink—in 1605 by Miguel de Cervantes and famously known simply as Don Quixote.

Prison life is nothing if not tedious. Boredom is the surest companion to anyone inside. I longed for adventure, a chance to break free from my ball and chain and get out and do something, anything other than what I typically did from one dull day to the next.  I therefore found plenty of adventure and excitement through reading this book, here, in my opinion, is why.

The known world of routine corruption and commonplace disruption is what Don Quixote seeks to escape by immersing himself in books of knights in shining armour, blue moon romances and a deluxe edition of grand illusions.  With most of his mind stuck in the last book, or most of the last book stuck in his mind, Don Quixote summons his loyal servant and true friend, Sancho Panza, to accompany him on a horseback adventure across the badlands of La Mancha, Spain in search of good times, good vibrations, and goodness knows what else.  In the stratosphere of classic world literature, Don Quixote is the ultimate tale of adventure. The fact is that happiness—as we instinctively know and sometimes forget—is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.  With long reins in one hand and longer sword in the other, Don Quixote strides tall in the cowhide saddle of his bull-headed imagination to do battle with windmills and sheep and Little Bo Peep.  Sancho Panza tries to reason with the befuddled Don Quixote but to no avail.  The man of La Mancha is large and in charge.  He is, at bottom, the man of La Mancha and a man who will inspire you to straddle your horse and set your sights on grand adventure before sorrowful dementia.

I guess that for someone who has been behind walls for more than half my life, I could dare to say I’m qualified to comment on prison literature.

Of the huge number of books on prison life, fiction and nonfiction, Stephen King has to be the author who gets it most right.

Rising from the fertile imagination of Stephen King are daylight demons that twist and turn into midnight monsters who slip, slide, peep, and creep knee deep through the mist and moonbeams of your troubled dreams.  Primarily a master writer of things that thump before they bump in the night, King is just as skilful in transcending the horror genre to create ordinary stories which give way to extraordinary circumstances.  Hence Different Seasons.  A quartet of novellas as varied in tone, temperature and feel as the four seasons to which their titles correspond.

Although each tale carries the weight and disturbance of a tombstone, one story in particular rises above the others to carry the weight and resonance of thunder.  “Hope Springs Eternal: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” is a 1940s rough-side-of-the-mountain story of the penitentiary and its brutal personalities, brutal intentions, and brutal injustices.  Longing, hope and perseverance flow through the tale as resoundingly as the midnight rumble of a distant freight train throughout moonlit cell blocks and mingling with dreams and recollections and memories of a better day, better time, better place.

“Shawshank Redemption” is memorable because at its core it is a love story.  Not sexualized romantic love, which is as fleeting and fragile as faithfulness, but genuine love which is genuine friendship, love without wings.  Two prisoners forge a perfect friendship in an imperfect place that allows each to see themselves and one another through days of desperation seemingly without end.  A genuine friendship is what lends this story a rainbow elegance while providing a subtle reminder that you can count yourself lucky if you find and keep one good friend in this world.

Prison is many things, lonely and boring among them.

Yet books became my true friends throughout my imprisonment and here in my post-prison life, still are.