It’s Juneteenth, which makes an incredibly appropriate day to review Lies We Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley. This book was on my radar since it first came out in 2014, but it took a wee bit of time to actually find time to read it. (Seriously, on this site, I know I’m not the only one who’s reading list is longer than the time I’ll ever possibly have to read over the course of my entire life…) What first drew me in was that the […]
Never thought a John Grisham novel could make me cry
Becoming a parent (which my wife and I did two years ago) does some strange and unexpected things to your brain. I’ve spent the entirety of my time on this earth identifying with the kid in every parent-child relationship. I’ve always seen myself as the kid. I had no other perspective from which to peer at the world. And then…..it shifted. Given those same parent-child situations, I now see it from the other side. This is such a simple shift in perspective, but there’s a […]
One man’s crusade for compassion against injustice
This isn’t my typical copy of tea as I rarely read non-fiction, but I am glad someone suggested it for our book club. This was a really tough read, but eye-opening regarding the prison system in the United States, and the many ways in which it is broken. Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer who has chosen to spend his energy, and most of his life, fighting for the wrongly imprisoned, and/or wrongly convicted. The facts as written in this book is that if you are […]
A sadly relevant tale: the 1970 murder of an innocent black man by three white men
The state of North Carolina is a perfect example of “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” In Blood Done Sign My Name, Tim Tyson recounts a story from his youth in Oxford, NC in which a young black man is murdered by three white men, all of whom were fully acquitted by a white jury. The heart of Tyson’s story is the 1970 murder of Henry Marrow, a black Vietnam veteran with a wife, two children, and another on the way. […]