The Grace Collection

Douglas Blackmon, a bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal (one of the most conservative papers in America), was doing a story involving the industrial revolution in the South following the Civil War. While visiting a historic iron ore mine in Alabama, Blackmon stumbled across a section of the site that contained numerous graves. Curious, he asked his guide what they were looking at. The answer shocked him and began a long journey into the ugliness of the so-called judicial system that exploded across the former Confederacy following the emancipation of their cheap labor. Combing through spotty records that (amazingly) still exist in rural courthouses and linking those leads with personal correspondence and diaries from the same time period, Blackmon was able to reconstruct a shameful history of corrupt law enforcement officers, corrupt politicians and corrupt government officials all conspiring to oppress black people, coercing innocents into forced labor and, as those initial grave...

 As a parent, I can confirm that one of the biggest parental fears is finding your child in a situation that you cannot help them out of. The Boy Between describes the journey of a young man, Josiah Hartley, who goes off to college and slips deeper and deeper into depression, finally reaching the point where he desires to end his own life by overdosing on pills. At the same time, it describes the journey his mother, Amanda Prowse, simultaneously endured. His story is a candid portrayal of what living with mental illness looks and feels like. Her story is a tale of a mother's intuition that something isn't right with her child, frustration when the system fails to provide any answers, much less protect Josiah, the nightmare of persevering in the need to help him and realizing, when she is ultimately successful at reaching him, that time had almost run out.  The final part of the book describes what life looks like for Josiah and his family afterward his brush with death. How lo...

  If you couldn't guess from the title, this book is one that deals with racism. How to define it, how to talk about it, how to be aware you are perpetuating it, this time from a black man's perspective.   However, Ibram X. Kendi knows better than to simply take about race. He understands just how complicated our biases are. That it isn't possible to talk about race without also talking about gender, economic classes and sexuality. That racism not only happens between people of different races but often occurs between people of the same race. (Don't believe it? Think about this: if you are white, have you ever thought to yourself something along the lines of "at least I'm not like that white trash over there"? Trust me. It happens far more than we want to admit.) By starting with a baseline for understanding racism and then layering other biases on top of how we think about the color of our skin, Kendi gives us a comprehensive look at how much work we all ...