My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun [Hardcover]

Theo Padnos (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 28, 2004

In a nely wrought memoir, thirty-three-year-old Theo Padnos describes his experiences teaching a literature class inside a locked prison room at the Woodstock Correctional Facility in Vermont. His students, ages seventeen to twenty-ve, stand accused of grisly, calculated crimes: beatings, rape, drug dealing, and murder. All are drifting, including the teacher himself. By rejecting standard prison safety precautions-videotape, monitored windows, an open door-Padnos creates an atmosphere of trust, and through the works of seminal American writers, enables these young prisoners to talk about their lives and the apocalyptic myths and metaphors that motivate their crimes. Armed with self-deprecating humor, Theo Padnos guides his students to discover themselves and each other through the power of the written word-and nds himself along the way. My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun is a clear-eyed work that penetrates a formerly unmapped territory and unflinchingly tackles questions that haunt us.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For a year and a half (1999-2000), Padnos was a part-time instructor at Vermont's Woodstock Regional Correctional Facility, a jail for "inmates... waiting for sentences to be handed down, or for trials to begin or plea bargains to be worked out." His gothic American writers syllabus gives way to a new syllabus: "menace and violence in the American landscape." These musings, accompanied by Padnos's students' usually scatological commentary, make the author appear to be an ex-teaching assistant show-off, as he explains how he handles literature, including some Baldwin and Bowles, a bit of Whitman and Dickinson, lots of Raymond Carver and lots and lots of Stephen King. Padnos appears in other parts of the book as one of the inmates' pals (or perhaps even a wannabe), flaunting pot smoking, afflicted with more than a touch of voyeurism, absorbed in the newspaper accounts of inmates' crimes and wanting to know more about their "life on the outside." It's a patchy mix, as Padnos shares more and more chunks of his "jail diary," a work too aptly described by the author as "hardly writing at all.... It involved not an instant's worth of thinking." Although Padnos describes the jail as "overrun with rural pedophiles and drunk drivers," he's absorbed with the grislier tales. An obsessive interest in Lance Stanard (who murdered his mother) occupies the book's center, augmented by Padnos's interest in the teenage murderers of two Dartmouth professors in May 2000. "Maybe too zealously interested," Padnos says, even "becoming a little unhealthy, a little repetitive."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Theo Padnos finished his Ph.D. in 2000. He is currently studying fanaticism in Pakistan and Europe.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Miramax (January 28, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786869097
• ISBN-13: 978-0786869091
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,815,485 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gut-wrenching, Courageous and Truthful, February 16, 2004

By 

Ron Powers "marksam" (Vermont) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun (Hardcover)

Jailhouse literature is a rising trend these days, and it is producing some of the toughest, most original, most disturbing nonfiction on the market. From the lost souls at Guantanamo Bay to the terrifying Aryan gangs that kill and terrorize from behind bars to the dread-soaked life of a Sing Sing guard, a composite portrait is emerging of the mostly invisible Hell that is the American prison system and the dehumanizing effects it has on inmates and their keepers alike.

Theo Padnos has made a quirky, but brilliant and unforgettable contribution to this literature. From his vantage point as a part-time English teacher in a gothic juvenile detention center in Vermont, Padnos draws us--almost against our will--into a collection of scary, wretched, lost young men who have been obliterated from the view of "respectable" society. In terse, electric, revelatory prose, sparing neither his subjects nor himself, he obliges us to see them for who they inescapably are: versions of ourselves, versions of an America drifting toward apocalypse.

This is a book that demands attention--more attention, by the way, than it received from the prissy, careless Publishers Weekly reviewer quoted above. In garbling the name of one of the chief characters in this book, Laird (not "Lance"!) Stanard, the PW scribe unwittingly represents the blindness and indifference of a society that is a lot more complacent about its incarcerated alter-egos than perhaps it can afford to be.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent, honest book, April 25, 2004

By 

Ben Jones (Paris, France) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun (Hardcover)

This book keeps getting beaten up for not being science or pure sociology, and reviewers keep missing what is excellent about it--the intersection of the writer's own reflections, aspirations and ideas with the violent, dull, and endless world of incarcerated young men. Padnos's honesty about his own motives and feelings give this book a rare freshness. In his attempts to connect the books he loves to the real and brutal world of these men, he illuminates much about the struggles of growth, the uneven progress of our ambitions, and the enduring power of stories to shape all of our lives.