Fidel & Leo

by Paul Mareth


Formats

Softcover
£11.75
Softcover
£11.75

Book Details

Language : English
Publication Date : 16/11/2001

Format : Softcover
Dimensions : 6x9
Page Count : 408
ISBN : 9780759647381

About the Book

America’s prisons are bursting at the seams. More than two million Americans are now behind bars, with the inmate population growing more than 10% year. Since it costs more to maintain a prisoner than to send someone to the finest medical or law school, this has become a corrosive political and social issue, capturing unprecedented media attention: cover stories in The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, The Economist, American Prospect, and Atlantic Monthly; a five-part Nightline series with Ted Koppel reporting from behind bars, etc.

Fidel & Leo (the title is a pun on Beethoven’s prison opera, Fidelio) is the story of a young Venezuelan software genius (Rocco, nicknamed "Fidel"), an old holocaust survivor (Leo), and a pioneering American woman filmmaker (Nora) who find a way to solve this problem by creating a new industry: small, inexpensive, and humane prisons with computer-simulated environments. The prisons are adapted from ordinary commercial real estate, franchised, and adopted all over the world, making billionaires of the partners. The story is about what happens to them, their prisoners – and America.


About the Author

Paul Mareth is an independent filmmaker, multimedia project manager, and teacher. He has written and produced award-winning short films under grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Swedish Film Institute, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Canon USA, and others.

After a year as a Visiting Faculty Fellow in the History of Science program at Princeton University, be began working as a consultant to Bell Laboratories on its "Ariel" (Automated Retrieval of Information Electronically) system, and has since consulted for Prodigy Services Company, IBM, Philips New Media (Eindhoven, Holland), Sony USA Electronic Publishing, Educational Testing Service, the Diebold Institute for Public Policy Studies, and the Children’s Television Workshop.

Mr. Mareth is the founder and owner of ProjectionsÒ Company, an (www.projco.com), an international multimedia project management consulting firm. Fidel & Leo is Mareth’s first novel. He lives in North Carolina.