Just Mercy: Highly Recommend This Book

I’m almost finished reading Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I can’t recommend it enough! Have you read it already? I know I am usually behind the ball when it comes to book recommendations!

I’m already a huge fan of Bryan Stevenson. I became familiar with his work years ago when he was a keynote speaker at an education conference. But I didn’t get around to reading Just Mercy until Thanksgiving Break.

Whoa! I can’t recommend it enough. I wish everyone would read it.

Bryan says, “You have to get to the truth before you get to the restoration. You have to get to the truth before you get to the reconciliation.” It’s a huge theme in his life’s work. He focuses a lot on healing. But he explains that the healing can’t start until we tell the truth.

In Just Mercy, he tells the truth about the ways in which racism and classism impact the criminal justice system in the United States. The book is the perfect hybrid of statistics and overarching trends alongside personal memoir and illustrative anecdotes.

So far, the book has brought me to tears too many times to count. Like body-racking sobs. For example, there’s a prison guard who is just awful. He has racist bumper stickers all over his truck (as well as a gun rack). He subjects Bryan (and others) to unauthorized abuses of power. But then he ends up admitting that he had a really hard time in foster care growing up, and he goes out of his way to perform an incredibly kind act of service for an inmate.

It shook me to my core because it speaks to what I believe: hurt people hurt people. And there is so much hurt in the world (and a whole lot in the United States). And if we want to move from a domination to a partnership society, we have to help people heal.

The last book that shook me to my core this much was John Lewis’s autobiography—Walking with the Wind. I read it when I was teaching in a small town in rural Louisiana. It gave me so much inspiration to “beat the drum of justice.” It’s a huge part of why I decided to dedicate my life to reforming the education system.

I’m for sure adding Just Mercy to my list of top four. In no particular order, they are Walking with the Wind, Parable of the Sower (you have to push past the first boring 50 pages), and The Poisonwood Bible.

(And in the writing of this post, I realized John Lewis published another book before he passed away. I need to read that one next!