Life-25: Interviews with Prisoners Serving Life Sentences

Life-25: Interviews with Prisoners Serving Life Sentences (New Star), by P.J. Murphy and Lloyd Johnsen, surprised me. The authors wanted to find out how it feels to serve a life sentence with no hope of parole for twenty-five years, a subject that had never crossed my mind. So Life-25 was a last resort when I realized I wouldn’t have anything to read on the bus. I ignored the preface to jump right into the first interview, and it wasn’t long before I realized that these guys were all murderers. Mark shot a cabbie, Barry killed his mother, Bruce shot his uncle. What do you do after you’ve done that? How can you even live? Questions I’d never considered, but questions that these fifteen men will consider for at least twenty-five years. And these guys were so, well, human. That’s what shocked me and what kept me reading. In the end I read the Epilogue and then the Preface, both of which explained what the authors were trying to get at, but it was the voices of the men themselves that made this book unforgettable.