Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

As I write, Arkansas is trying to execute eight men on a calendar of two a day, every other day, for over a week, beginning next Monday, April 17. The state “needs” to kill the men before the medications used in the lethal injections expire. Most of these men have been on death row for over twenty years, and now they are rushed to death because of an expiration date on a drug.

I can hardly bear to think, talk, or read about capital punishment because it feels so fundamentally wrong. So I’m amazed at how Bryan Stevenson could turn a book about death row into truly A Story of Justice and Redemption.

Stevenson is a wonderful storyteller, spotlighting individuals whom he has helped, or tried to help, since he founded the Equal Justice Initiative to defend those often wrongly condemned and trapped in the criminal justice system.

Stevenson gives horrifying numbers for what has happened in that system, to whom it has happened (mainly poor and/or dark skinned people), why it has happened, what it costs – both in terms of dollars and suffering.

He explains where we go wrong when we (with good intentions) personalize victims such as seven year-old Megan Kanka, for whom Megan’s Law is named. He explains the profit motive in incarceration.

But mainly he shows us people like ourselves, but without affluent white privilege: Walter McMillan, a black man sentenced to die for a murder he patently did not commit; Herbert Richardson, a traumatized young veteran who only meant to scare a pretty young nurse into his arms with a homemade bomb, but killed a child instead; Marsha Colbey, a mother who suffered the sadness of a stillborn child, but was demonized as a murderous parent because she was very poor; and more.

What most impresses me (and puzzled me a little at first) is Stevenson’s calm, steady perseverance: every day he walks into prisons and courthouses where the people in power are not glad to see him. They are not willing to listen, or reconsider, or admit a centimeter of error even in the face of plain and undeniable facts.

How does he keep doing such work day after day, year after year, understaffed and beleaguered by people desperate for his help?

I think his superpower comes from an amazing lack of ego. He never lets the challenges become about him. He kept his focus on others, on their needs. He admits his own brokenness – indeed, he recognizes it as a gateway to grace. And that grace, mingled with intelligence and training, keep him going. It sounds so simple, but seems so hard. I’m inspired and instructed and humbled. Just Mercy was a perfect choice for a Lenten read.

— Sharelle Moranville

Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance

This book, subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, is exactly that, a memoir.  Hard to think of a memoir written by someone who was only 31 years old when he wrote it! Vance himself confesses the absurdity of this in his introduction where he writes, “I didn’t write this book because I’ve accomplished something extraordinary.  I wrote this book because I’ve achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grow up like me.  You see, I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.”

And so Vance begins to tell his story. What makes this story compelling is that, while it tells of all the ways in which the decline of manufacturing jobs in the United States has left people behind, he is unflinchingly honest about the ways in which many of his people, whom he calls “hillbillies,” have brought about their own demise and their own lack of hope – their lack of care for their children, their sinking into the drug culture, their laziness and lack of any self-awareness.

Vance’s own family has had its difficulties.  As he writes, “I have, to put it mildly, a complex relationship with my parents, one of whom has struggled with addiction for nearly my entire life.”  He himself came close to flunking out of high school: “Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me.  That is the real story of my life, and that is why I wrote this book.  I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it.  I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children.  I want people to understand the American Dream as my family and I encountered it.  I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels.  And I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.”

Vance clearly has a great love for the people about whom he writes, particularly his crazy grandmother and grandfather – and “crazy” is his word, not mine.  This love comes shining through the book even when he sees clearly how the ways in which they act have negative effects on everyone around them.

— Jeanie Smith

Run, by Ann Patchett

When I first read Run, I dismissed it as being mediocre, especially by Ann Patchett’s standards. But then I kept thinking about it. About the scenes Patchett builds and the characters she creates. When our book club decided to read it, we found much to love about it, much to question, and much to learn. Patchett’s standards are, after all, pretty high.

This is a book about how families work and how they don’t, about whether we love biological children more or less than adopted. It’s about family deception: It starts with a story about a statue of the Virgin Mary that was carved to look like Bernadette’s Irish grandmother. It is a flat-out lie—the statue was stolen by her grandfather during a drunken night out—but the family chooses to believe the lie even though they fully know the the truth. The lie, of course, is much lovelier. The mysterious mother figure, Tennessee, is not entirely who she says she is. Father Sullivan is not a saint, and his nephew Sullivan’s recent past is a little more murky than he suggests. Doyle tries to manipulate them all and Tip and Teddy do their best to become who they want to be, more or less, although their father’s shadow is large and controlling.

Patchett has been criticized for implicit racism in the book—the white family is the ideal, the Black is flawed, and all Black people can run fast. But Kenya is a delightfully authentic little girl and she would clearly choose to be with her mother, in her dark little apartment, surrounded by the love she has always known rather than in the bright and airy Doyle home. Ultimately, she has no choice, and she becomes the family heiress, who inherits the magic statue. The fact that she looks nothing like that version of the Blessed Virgin doesn’t even enter into Bernard’s decision. So I see a lot of color blindness here, but I can see how that in itself presents a rosy happy-ever-after ending that shrugs off the harsh realities of living with a skin tone a tad too dark to be Irish. — Pat Prijatel