The Norwegian journalist and author Jan Tystad tells in this book about his American pen friend who has been on Death Row in Florida for 33 years. The prisoner tells in his letters how it feels to be isolated for so many years, and how he has been helped by listening to music player and follow the news and documentaries on TV. Dennis has showed an unbelievable strength in such an environment, helped very much by classic music which he can listen to for hours. He has also developed great knowledge about the world and the politicians who runs it, by listening to news and documentaries on his small TV in the cell. Dennis is only allowed out of the cell for five hours a week to walk in the forecourt. He finds happiness and friendship in letter writing and fight every day to prevent that the death sentence is executed. He hope that the governor of Florida will change the sentence to life prisonment, which would mean that he will be a free man, the life sentence is 25 years in Florida.

The Norwegian journalist and author Jan Tystad tells in this book about his American pen friend who has been on Death Row in Florida for 33 years. The prisoner tells in his letters how it feels to be isolated for so many years, and how he has been helped by listening to music player and follow the news and documentaries on TV. Dennis has showed an unbelievable strength in such an environment, helped very much by classic music which he can listen to for hours. He has also developed great knowledge about the world and the politicians who runs it, by listening to news and documentaries on his small TV in the cell. Dennis is only allowed out of the cell for five hours a week to walk in the forecourt. He finds happiness and friendship in letter writing and fight every day to prevent that the death sentence is executed. He hope that the governor of Florida will change the sentence to life prisonment, which would mean that he will be a free man, the life sentence is 25 years in Florida.

"A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn't commit"--

"My Friends on Death Row; Voices Silenced, One by One" is a book of letters from people on death row -- 31 of them. Most have either been executed or died from other causes. The letters were written by a wide range of people, with many different stories. At one extreme we find the letters of an admitted serial killer. At the other is a man who confessed to a large array of crimes he never committed. Some committed crimes of passion. Some may have been innocent of the crimes for which they received the death penalty. Helen listened to all of them with compassion and a non-judgmental spirit that allowed them to relate to her in a direct and honest manner. In her introduction, Helen writes, "the memories of many incidents have haunted me, and will for the rest of my life. I can still hear, for example, the boots of the official murder technicians stomping past the visiting room as I sat knee to knee with my best friend. They were on their way to test the electric chair in the adjacent room. That same chair would detonate by fire healthy living flesh. I remember him saying, 'I am half way to heaven.' A TV van waited outside to film the hearse. I was aware of the empty prison yard, and the un-empathic guards. I saw that my friend's lips were chewed up because he had promised to be strong for me. His final look will never leave me. Those sounds and images still haunt me."Helen's work with prisoners on death row began when she made a commitment in the back of a church to "love the unloved." As she later discovered, this was very similar to the vow made by another Catholic, Mother Theresa, which was to serve the "poorest of the poor." Helen's ministry began with a single letter to a prisoner on death row. Within a year, her list of correspondents had expanded to 50 prisoners across the US and in foreign countries. The most difficult part for her was losing so many friends needlessly. However, she was determined to live to tell about it, so that she could give a voice to those who were silenced on the gurney. That was her promise to the people on death row. This book is the fulfillment of that promise. Helen has written an introduction and a conclusion, but the bulk of the book consists simply of the letters that prisoners wrote to her. Spelling has been corrected, and in a few places, minor changes in punctuation have been made for the sake of clarity. But in these letters you will find the words and thoughts of the prisoners themselves.

A riveting, behind-the-bars look at one of America's most feared prisons: San Quentin-- by a minister to the lost souls sitting on death row. Himself a former criminal, Smith shares the most important lessons he's learned from years of helping inmates discover God's plan for them. Their stories show us that it is still possible to find God's grace and mercy from behind bars, and that it's never too late to turn our lives around.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist • “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review “Beautifully crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.”—The Washington Post In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author, an extraordinary story of redemption in the darkest of places.