This memoir by a professor at Indiana State University tells of a higher education program she created in a maximum-security correctional facility, and the extraordinary prisoner, Larry Newton, whose life was transformed by contact with the greatest playwright in the English language. Laura Bates describes how a man living on the streets before he was eight and incarcerated since the age of seventeen—without hope of parole, for a crime at which he was present but did not commit—not only absorbs and identifies with Shakespeare's philosophies, but eradicates his own violent impulses. Newton is even inspired to design films and workbooks of the famous plays to guide others—felons and college students—into life-altering encounters with the works of the Bard. A Reader Review by Pamela Cooper of Indian Springs, Alabama