Education
Tony Parker died in Westleton, Suffolk, having just completed his study of his American counterpart Studs Terkel.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001R2AKW8/?tag=2022091-20
( In 1970 Tony Parker was permitted by the Home Office to...)
In 1970 Tony Parker was permitted by the Home Office to make a series of visits to HMP Grendon Underwood, the UK's first psychiatric prison, there to interview inmates and staff for a study of the institution and its unique community. 'Tony Parker deserves a place in any future history of literature for his contribution to the creative use of the tape-recorder... We can only guess at the qualities of patience and perceptiveness which have enabled Mr Parker to make of his material one of the most important studies ever to have been published of the habitual criminal.' TLS 'The reader will find himself as deeply involved with his characters as Mr Parker is himself.' Spectator
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465025889/?tag=2022091-20
Tony Parker died in Westleton, Suffolk, having just completed his study of his American counterpart Studs Terkel.
Born in Stockport, Cheshire, Parker was a conscientious objector during World World War II, and directed to work in a coal mine. He moved to London and worked as a publisher"s representative at Odhams Press. He campaigned against capital punishment and became very interested in prisons and their occupants, eventually focussing on the experiences of prisoners after release.
Work
His books comprise lengthy interviews with his various subjects.
He does not include his questions. He attempts to record his subjects "without comment or judgement".
He began by specialising in studies of convicted criminals in Britain. His later books took a wider range of subjects: a poor housing estate, a small town in America, post-Communist Russia and the lives of lighthouse-keepers.
Anthony Storr described him in 1970 as "Britain"s most expert interviewer, mouthpiece of the inarticulate and counsel for the defence of those whom society has shunned and abandoned".
As Colin Ward wrote in the Independent, Parker"s "own triumphs were the result of his gentleness and modesty, which led the most taciturn or suspicious of people to open up with confidences they would not dream of revealing to more self-assertive questioners". The anonymous obituarist in the Telegraph stressed that "his real gift was for creating sympathetic silences into which murderers, thugs, child molesters, rapists and baby-batterers could pour their confidences without inhibition". He also wrote plays for television and episodes of Juliet Bravo, The Gentle Touch, Within These Walls, and Crown Court.
( In 1970 Tony Parker was permitted by the Home Office to...)
