An overwhelming sense of symmetry permeates The Special Prisoner, but it doesn't come in the lovely, harmonious, balanced variety. Instead it's the terrifying symmetry of life at its most basic, of innocence, guilt, death, and rebirth. Jim Lehrer's hero, Bishop John Quincy Watson, is imprisoned alternately in physical and metaphysical realms throughout the novel, a "man of God and grace"... (read more)