"There's something essentially human about communing with authors, dead and alive. Especially dead ones though, beause you can't talk to him otherwise." "Reading is probably one of the more democratic things we could do than we could do in our lives," she says. 'It's just too hard to examine our lives when we have books in our lives' She adds that literacy is important because it allows people to meet intellectually over a book.
Author, lawyer, and poet Dwayne Betts talks about his time in prison and the power of reading with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Betts is the founder of the Million Book Project, which aims to put a small library of great books in 1,000 U.S. prisons. Betts discusses his plans for the project and how reading helped him transform himself.