Helen Prejean, C. S. J., is a writer, lecturer, and community
organizer who was born in Baton Rouge and has lived and worked in
Louisiana all her life. Her groundbreaking firsthand account of the
death penalty, Dead Man Walking, has been adapted into a movie, an
opera, and a play for high schools and colleges. She is also the
author of The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful
Executions. She has lectured extensively on the subject of capital
punishment and has appeared on 60 Minutes, NBC’s Today Show, NPR’s
Weekend Edition and Fresh Air, PBS’s Frontline, BBC World Service
radio, and an NBC special series on the death penalty. She has
received honorary degrees from colleges and universities across the
United States. She is a member of the Congregation of St.
Joseph.
www.sisterhelen.org
“Deeply moving . . . Sister Prejean is an excellent writer, direct
and honest and unsentimental. . . . She almost palpably extends a
hand to her readers.” —The New York Times Book Review
“An immensely moving affirmation of the power of religious
vocation. . . . Stunning moral clarity.” —The Washington Post Book
World
“Here is one voice for life. We really should need no other.” —The
New York Review of Books
"An intimate meditation on crime and punishment, life and death,
justice and mercy and—above all—Christian love in its most
all-embracing sense. . . . [Prejean] never shrinks from the horror
of what she has seen. She never resorts to something so predictable
as pathos or a play for sympathy." —Los Angeles Times
"A remarkable writer . . . Prejean's manner of describing the
tortured relations among prisoners, criminal-justice officers and
victims' families would be the envy of many novelists. Even if your
own views on capital punishment are set in concrete, you are sure
to be moved by the force of Prejean's personality and commitment."
—Glamour
"Painful and powerful . . . [Prejean's] practical moral courage is
heroic." —The New Yorker
"Providing a gritty look at what really happens in the final hours
of a death row inmate . . . Prejean takes readers to a place most
will thankfully never know . . . adeptly probing the morality of a
judicial system and a country that kills its citizens." —San
Francisco Chronicle
"An impassioned condemnation of capital punishment." —Cleveland
Plain Dealer
"This arresting account should do for the debate over capital
punishment what the film footage from Selma and Birmingham
accomplished for the civil rights movement: turn abstractions into
flesh and blood. Tough, fair, bravely alive—you will not come away
from this book unshaken."
—BillMcKibben
Ask a Question About this Product More... |