Biography
Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn't commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship--and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever. Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer's coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice. Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction - Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction - Winner of a Books for a Better Life Award - Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize - Finalist for the Kirkus Reviews Prize - An American Library Association Notable Book "Every bit as moving as To Kill a Mockingbird, and in some ways more so . . . a searing indictment of American criminal justice and a stirring testament to the salvation that fighting for the vulnerable sometimes yields."--David Cole, The New York Review of Books "Searing, moving . . . Bryan Stevenson may, indeed, be America's Mandela."--Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times "You don't have to read too long to start cheering for this man. . . . The message of this book . . . is that evil can be overcome, a difference can be made. Just Mercy will make you upset and it will make you hopeful."--Ted Conover, The New York Times Book Review "Inspiring . . . a work of style, substance and clarity . . . Stevenson is not only a great lawyer, he's also a gifted writer and storyteller."--The Washington Post "As deeply moving, poignant and powerful a book as has been, and maybe ever can be, written about the death penalty."--The Financial Times "Brilliant."--The Philadelphia Inquirer
Carrie: This is a personal growth read for me. After the death of George Floyd and the subsequent protests and call-out of systemic racism, I needed to make a conscious effort to learn and understand. The book was a Christmas gift, already on my shelf and under my roof, so I started here. Wow! Eye-opening in the category of how did I not know all this was happening in the last 35 years?! What started as a law school internship opportunity for Bryan Stevenson has become a lifelong passion. He and his organization, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) have been slowly chipping away at the death penalty in our country and its inordinate bias toward the poor and Black, and more shockingly, its application to those who are innocent or at the very least did not have a fair trial. Eloquent, touching, heartfelt, this is as much Bryan’s personal story as it is a chronicle of EJI’s work. He gives myriad personal named examples of those bulldozed by the system, but a main thread centers on Walter McMillian because his is one of the early cases Bryan worked on and one of the first successes. There are so many layers here - the penal system truly is like a ball of twine to untangle, but to Stevenson’s credit, he reached in and started pulling. I was left with hope, inspiration and awe that one person can make a monumental difference, though Bryan Stevenson never toots his own horn, but calls us all to be better.
From her Italian American childhood through singlehood, raising and feeding a growing family, divorce, and a new marriage to food writer Michael Ruhlman, Ann Hood has long appreciated the power of a good meal. Growing up, she tasted love in her grandmother's tomato sauce and dreamed of her mother's special-occasion Fancy Lady Sandwiches. Later, the kitchen became the heart of Hood's own home. She cooked pork roast to warm her first apartment, used two cups of dried basil for her first attempt at making pesto, taught her children how to make their favorite potatoes, found hope in her daughter's omelet after a divorce, and fell in love again--with both her husband and his foolproof chicken stock.
Hood tracks her lifelong journey in the kitchen with twenty-seven heartfelt essays, each accompanied by a recipe (or a few). In "Carbonara Quest," searching for the perfect spaghetti helped her cope with lonely nights as a flight attendant. In the award-winning essay "The Golden Silver Palate," she recounts the history of her fail-safe dinner party recipe for Chicken Marbella--and how it did fail her when she was falling in love. Hood's simple, comforting recipes also include her mother's famous meatballs, hearty Italian Beef Stew, classic Indiana Fried Chicken, the perfect grilled cheese, and a deliciously summery peach pie.
With Hood's signature humor and tenderness, Kitchen Yarns spills tales of loss and starting from scratch, family love and feasts with friends, and how the perfect meal is one that tastes like home.
Jenny: Joe Maddon, former manager of the Cubs, is gone (I miss ya, Joe!), but Joe loved one of my favorite books, Walter Isaacson’sLeonardo Da Vinci. Joe was inspired to choose his 2016 theme “Putting the art back into the game” based on Isaacson’s book.
This pandemic might be just the right time to tackle a tome like this.
Here’s three reasons this book is worth reading now:
1) Da Vinci reminds us that there’s potential in each of us to be successful despite what life throws at us.
Da Vinci was lucky to be born a bastard, otherwise he would have been required to follow in his father’s footsteps as a notary. Instead, he was allowed to be a freethinking, creative, cool cat who followed his own pursuits. Another upside to being born out of wedlock was that he was NOT sent to Latin school so he was mainly self-taught through his insatiable curiosity and experimentation which led him to have an incredible range of experiences culminating in the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. Not bad.
2) A meaningful life is derived through curiosity:
His scientific explorations informed his art. As Isaacson writes:
“As he (Da Vinci) aged, he pursued his scientific inquiries not just to serve his art but out of a joyful instinct to fathom the profound beauties of creation. When he groped for a theory of why the sky appears blue, it was not simply to inform his painting. His curiosity was pure, personal, and delightfully obsessive.”
3) Genius is cultivated and developed, not just something you’re born with:
Da Vinci was a genius.
But as Isaacson reminds us: “We should be wary of that word. Slapping the ‘genius’ label on Leonardo oddly minimizes him by making it seem as if he were touched by lightning.…In fact, Leonardo’s genius was a human one, wrought by his own will and ambition. (Are you watching the Michael Jordan documentary???? You’ll get a feel for why this point is so important!) It did not come from being the divine recipient…His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation.”
This book is a marvel to read. And if there’s a fourth reason to read it it would be that Leo dressed in a fun way, was a great conversationalist, and was kind to animals. Oops, that’s six. I would like to have known him!
Jenny: Joe Maddon, former manager of the Cubs, is gone (I miss ya, Joe!), but Joe loved one of my favorite books, Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci. Joe was inspired to choose his 2016 theme “Putting the art back into the game” based on Isaacson’s book.
This pandemic might be just the right time to tackle a tome like this.
Here’s three reasons this book is worth reading now:
1) Da Vinci reminds us that there’s potential in each of us to be successful despite what life throws at us.
Da Vinci was lucky to be born a bastard, otherwise he would have been required to follow in his father’s footsteps as a notary. Instead, he was allowed to be a freethinking, creative, cool cat who followed his own pursuits. Another upside to being born out of wedlock was that he was NOT sent to Latin school so he was mainly self-taught through his insatiable curiosity and experimentation which led him to have an incredible range of experiences culminating in the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. Not bad.
2) A meaningful life is derived through curiosity:
His scientific explorations informed his art. As Isaacson writes:
“As he (Da Vinci) aged, he pursued his scientific inquiries not just to serve his art but out of a joyful instinct to fathom the profound beauties of creation. When he groped for a theory of why the sky appears blue, it was not simply to inform his painting. His curiosity was pure, personal, and delightfully obsessive.”
3) Genius is cultivated and developed, not just something you’re born with:
Da Vinci was a genius.
But as Isaacson reminds us: “We should be wary of that word. Slapping the ‘genius’ label on Leonardo oddly minimizes him by making it seem as if he were touched by lightning.…In fact, Leonardo’s genius was a human one, wrought by his own will and ambition. (Are you watching the Michael Jordan documentary???? You’ll get a feel for why this point is so important!) It did not come from being the divine recipient…His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation.”
This book is a marvel to read. And if there’s a fourth reason to read it it would be that Leo dressed in a fun way, was a great conversationalist, and was kind to animals. Oops, that’s six. I would like to have known him!
Nearly twenty years later, estranged from her mother and working at a Manhattan start-up, Qu requests her OCFS report. When it arrives, key details are wrong. Faced with this false narrative, and on the brink of losing her job as the once-shiny start-up collapses, Qu looks once more at her life's truths, from abandonment to an abusive family to seeking dignity and meaning in work.
Traveling from Wenzhou to Xi'an to New York, Made in China is a fierce memoir unafraid to ask thorny questions about trauma and survival in immigrant families, the meaning of work, and the costs of immigration.
The father is the first Theodore Roosevelt, a figure of unbounded energy, enormously attractive and selfless, a god in the eyes of his small, frail namesake. The mother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, is a Southerner and a celebrated beauty, but also considerably more, which the book makes clear as never before. There are sisters Anna and Corinne, brother Elliott (who becomes the father of Eleanor Roosevelt), and the lovely, tragic Alice Lee, TR's first love. All are brought to life to make "a beautifully told story, filled with fresh detail, " wrote "The New York Times Book Review"
A book to be read on many levels, it is at once an enthralling story, a brilliant social history and a work of important scholarship which does away with several old myths and breaks entirely new ground. It is a book about life intensely lived, about family love and loyalty, about grief and courage, about "blessed" mornings on horseback beneath the wide blue skies of the Badlands.
How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered--an icon and idol--alongside your own? Jenn Shapland's celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America's most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love.
Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a woman named Annemarie. Though Shapland recognizes herself in the letters, which are intimate and unabashed in their feelings, she does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. Her curiosity gives way to fixation, not just with this newly discovered side of McCullers's life, but with how we tell queer love stories. Why, Shapland asks, are the stories of women paved over by others' narratives? What happens when constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces? And what might the tracing of McCullers's life--her history, her secrets, her legacy--reveal to Shapland about herself?
In smart, illuminating prose, Shapland interweaves her own story with McCullers's to create a vital new portrait of one of our nation's greatest literary treasures, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.
"Kate Bowler is the only one we can trust to tell us the truth."--Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Untamed It's hard to give up on the feeling that the life you really want is just out of reach. A beach body by summer. A trip to Disneyland around the corner. A promotion on the horizon. Everyone wants to believe that they are headed toward good, better, best. But what happens when the life you hoped for is put on hold indefinitely? Kate Bowler believed that life was a series of unlimited choices, until she discovered, at age 35, that her body was wracked with cancer. In No Cure for Being Human, she searches for a way forward as she mines the wisdom (and absurdity) of today's "best life now" advice industry, which insists on exhausting positivity and on trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn, and out-perform our humanness. We are, she finds, as fragile as the day we were born. With dry wit and unflinching honesty, Kate Bowler grapples with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tries to come to terms with her limitations in a culture that says anything is possible. She finds that we need one another if we're going to tell the truth: Life is beautiful and terrible, full of hope and despair and everything in between--and there's no cure for being human.
A tribute to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that does more than catalog her achievements; it conveys her spirit, one that will leave readers in awe.*
This New York Times bestselling version of the acclaimed biography Notorious RBG is an excellent way to share with middle grade readers just why Justice Ginsburg was such a powerful role model. This entertaining and insightful full-color 200-page young readers' edition mixes pop culture, humor, and expert analysis for a remarkable account of the indomitable Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Heroine. Trailblazer. Pioneer.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an icon to millions. Her tireless fight for equality and women's rights inspired not only great strides in the workforce but impacted the law of the land. This accessible biography of this fierce woman, detailing her searing dissents and powerful jurisprudence, is a keeper. As School Library Journal* noted, This version shares the same knockout formatting as the adult edition: a plethora of photographs and images leaving nary a page unadorned.
Hand your middle grade reader this powerful and highly readable biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Includes a timeline, glossary, source list, index, and even a section that puts legal terms in plain English.
New York Times Bestseller
Featured in the critically acclaimed documentary RBG
It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the 'Notorious RBG. -- Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 2019
She was a fierce dissenter with a serious collar game. A legendary, self-described "flaming feminist litigator" who made the world more equal. And an intergenerational icon affectionately known as the Notorious RBG. As the nation mourns the loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, discover the story of a remarkable woman and learn how to carry on her legacy.
This runaway bestseller, brought to you by the attorney founder of the Notorious RBG Tumblr and an award-winning feminist journalist, is more than just a love letter. It draws on intimate access to Ginsburg's family members, close friends, colleagues, and clerks, as well as an interview with the Justice herself. An original hybrid of reported narrative, annotated dissents, rare archival photos and documents, and illustrations, the book tells a never-before-told story of an unusual and transformative woman who transcended divides and changed the world forever.
Sandy: I feel real strongly about this one. Yes, I’m a lawyer, wife of a lawyer and mother of a law student - but my science-y kids have read and loved this too. OK, I read parts of it aloud to Tom during lacrosse trips to tournaments. It’s not all lawyer-ish, it’s written by a huge RBG fan and lawyer but she asked aboard her writer friend who knew nothing about this Ginsburg person. It does look at how she changed the law, but in well-highlighted (literally, in the font) accessible language. The actual way that this tiny person strategically and patiently and brilliantly changed the world we live in is so important now - but as important I think is the story of how she became who she was, and maybe especially the marriage that allowed her to excel on all fronts. Read it, give it - truly.
Who would have thought a bespectacled, elderly jurist would become a pop-culture icon, feted in song and story so widely that she might be likened to a hip-hop star?
Though the hip-hop star in question, the late Notorious B.I.G., is an inapposite choice, MSNBC correspondent Carmon and attorney Knizhnik, building on the latter’s popular law-studies blog, serve up something between a biography and a scrapbook. If you want to understand how, through tireless work and endless determination, the scholarly RBG should have overcome discrimination to rise to the top of the judicial pyramid, then this book serves, but so too if you want “only to learn to get buff like an octogenarian who can do twenty push-ups.” Ginsburg starts on the elliptical, then moves on with her trainer to do planks, “where he does his best to knock the tiny justice down.” By this point, readers will understand that nothing can knock Justice Ginsburg down, not cancer or the death of a beloved spouse or having to see Samuel Alito every workday. “RBG had a job to do,” Carmon and Knizhnik cheer, “and she wasn’t done yet.” The book goes beyond admiring, and though it is generally courtly toward the rest of the court, Ginsburg is its unlikely dazzling star. By the end of this celebration, in which the authors make some pertinent, serious legal points, even readers disinclined to think of the justice as a pop icon will find new respect for her—unless, that is, they’re ideologically bound not to, for RBG emerges as an unshakable champion of women’s rights and, horrors, as a classic liberal. Besides, RBG writes a mean dissent—e.g., “This is not the first time this court has ordered a cramped interpretation of Title VII.”