Good Books Archives - Page 2 of 18

The Lost Art of Listening – Michael P. Nichols, PhD

(Feb 2018) Genuine listening involves a suspension of self. Holding your tongue while someone speaks is not the same thing as listening. To really listen, you have to suspend your own agenda. Forget about what you want to say, and concentrate on being a receptive vehicle for the other person.

Just because something is simple, doesn’t mean it’s easy. Actively listening is much harder than we believe it is and this book covers the subject from so many aspects. The author is a family therapist and his wisdom comes from years of helping individuals, families and couples to figure out better ways of communicating – which starts with cultivating better listening skills.

How we communicate – and listen – goes back to how we learned to do that in our families. Our parents may be the most important unfinished business of our lives.

We relate to people in the present on the basis of expectations from the past. We continue to live in the shadows of the families we grew up in. The sometimes vast difference between words spoken and message intended is nothing compared to the often vaster difference between what is said and what it heard.

Nichols makes an excellent point about self acceptance as the foundation of being an empathetic listener.

When you are trying to figure out why you or anyone else overreacts, keep in mind one of the great ironies of understanding: We are likely to be as accepting of others as we are of ourselves. That’s why those lucky enough to be raised with self respect make better listeners. If you learn to respect other people’s feelings, you will learn to treat your own feelings more kindly in the process. What we can’t tolerate in others is what we can’t tolerate in ourselves.

In addressing the hurdles encountered by couples, he has some very profound observations to make:

A relationship isn’t some you have, it’s something you do.

Sometimes marriage isn’t about resolving differences, but learning to live together with them.

Second and third marriages don’t fail because people keep picking the wrong partners. They fail because it’s not differences that matter, but how they are negotiated.

If you want the truth from someone, you must make it safe for him or her to tell it.

While he addresses listening in the work place in very effective ways, I found the most interesting parts of the book to be about the challenges of listening to the people who matter the most to us – our family members.

Ironically, our ability to listen is often worst with the people closest to us. Conflict, habit and the pressure of emotions makes us listen least well where listening is most needed. As we move outside the family circle to those we care about but don’t live with, we tend to be more open, more receptive and more flexible. Primarily because those relationships are less burdened with conflict and resentment.

In struggling to figure out just how much bandwidth I have to truly listen to the people I engage with everyday, I’ve come to the conclusion that not every person I encounter needs my full and undivided attention. In fact, there are people who demand attention in ways that mean it’s being taken away from others in my life who are important to me. Social media demands attention in ways that are often overwhelming and many times unproductive. Emails come flowing into several email accounts at all hours, seven days a week, with an immediate response expected. So intentionality is required to make certain that the people who should have our undivided attention are the ones actually getting it.

Sometimes it makes sense to write off unrewarding relationships that aren’t central to your life. That is a hard thing to do. Ultimately, saying “no” to that which is unrewarding means leaving more room for that which is rewarding.

I found this book an excellent read. If for no other reason, it reminded me of things I know to be true, but don’t always practice. Honing the skill of being an active listener is an endeavor worth undertaking.

by Catherine Read

Periods Gone Public: Taking a Stand for Menstrual Equity

(Nov 2017) “Tampons and sanitary towels . . . have always been considered a luxury. That isn’t by accident, that’s by design of an unequal society, in which the concerns of women are not treated as equally as the concerns of men.” – Stella Creasy, Member of British Parliament

I was fortunate to hear author Jennifer Weiss-Wolf talk about her book and her advocacy at Bards Alley in Vienna, VA, on Nov. 28th. The next day I was on a panel of women and girls giving a briefing on menstrual equity issues on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, to legislative staff members in the offices of Senator Tim Kaine, Senator Cory Booker and Congressman Gerry Connolly. Rep. Grace Meng made opening remarks and addressed the strides New York City has made in putting these sanitary hygiene products in public schools, homeless shelters and prisons free of charge. The work of Council Member Julissa Ferreras-Copeland of the New York City Council was instrumental in passing a bill in June of 2016 that was the first of its kind in the country.

Two young women on the panel, Ashley (24) and Jennifer (22) talked about their lack of access to needed menstrual supplies when they were incarcerated in jail. (They are both in a Virginia based re-entry program for formerly incarcerated women, Friends of Guest House.) They had to ask guards for pads, and it was up to the guards as to who got how many and when they received them. Requests were handled at the guards’ discretion and at their convenience. Ashley and Jennifer recreated for the hearing room a demonstration of how they made “prison tampons” out of substandard pads because they were more effective than the cheap flimsy pads. Being caught with a “prison tampon” was considered having contraband for which the prisoner could be charged.

Weiss-Wolf talks about her own dawning awareness of how many women in this country and around the world are impacted by the lack of access to the basic hygiene products that menstruation management requires. It affects women’s ability to get an education, to work, and to fully engage in productive daily activities. Factors like poverty, homelessness and incarceration leave many women and girls without access to products that are as necessary as toilet paper and soap – which are mandated by law to be in public restrooms.

The author talks about 2016 as “The Year of the Period.” From her own New Year’s Day thunderbolt to the Women’s March on January 21, 2017, to the trips she made to other parts of the world to research what was being done to address the issue of meeting women’s basic needs so we can fully function in society every day of the year.

Menstrual Equity is on the agenda of cities and states around the country, as well as in countries around the world with populations of women and girls living in poverty. There has been some innovation in place like India around creating small businesses that manufacture pads the poor women can afford. It also creates jobs for them.

In this country, there is a movement to roll back “The Tampon Tax” that places another financial burden on top of the expense of buying these products every month Since only people who menstruate use these products, only those people are paying the tax. The book also addresses the fact that transgender men and gender non-conforming individuals also menstruate. We need to move away from the term “feminine hygiene products” and call them menstrual hygiene products. This is less about a gender binary than acknowledging it as an issue of civil rights and basic human rights.

Weiss-Wolf also addresses the need to have better testing and full labeling on what is in the tampons women are using. Potentially toxic chemicals or artificial fibers need to be tested and consumer informed. She also points out that there is an environmental impact to providing more disposable products to more women around the world. Even bio-degradable products will take longer to breakdown than the lifespan of the people who have used them. Greater innovation needs to take place around how development menstrual management products that don’t have an adverse impact on the planet.

Locally here in Northern Virginia, Holly Seibold has founded BRAWS: Bringing Resources to Aid Women’s Shelters. This organization does product drives and distributes products to shelters and schools around the DC Metro area. They are also engaged in issue advocacy around Menstrual Equity. Delegate Jennifer Boysko is sponsoring two bills in Virginia’s 2018 legislative session, HB24 and HB25, that will address the elimination of “The Tampon Tax.”

I highly recommend this book as one everyone should read – men, women and children. We need to remove the stigma around discussing periods. Men and boys should understand this very natural and normal bodily function and should support menstruating individuals by advocating for greater access to menstrual hygiene products for those who need them. It is past time for our culture and our society to normalize that people have periods – every month – for most of their lives. I urge being informed and being an advocate on this issue.

by Catherine Read

The Comfort Food Diaries – Emily Nunn

(Oct 2017) I listened to The Comfort Food Diaries as an audiobook on a long drive from Northern Virginia to Dalton, GA, and back home again. I wanted my husband Tom to listen to this book with me because I didn’t think it was a book he would read otherwise. We both loved it.

Tom was drawn into Emily Nunn’s story without knowing any of the people in the book. I was drawn into the story because I knew many of the people in this book and I wanted Tom to know them too. I became aware of Emily’s journey on her Comfort Food tour because of Facebook. After connecting with her Aunt Mariah on Facebook, I ended up connecting with her cousins Toni and Susan, and then with Emily. There’s a point in the book when she talks about posting a question on Facebook asking people what they think of as their comfort food. I remember answering that question.

Galax is a small city in southwestern Virginia near the North Carolina border. The five Nunn siblings and the five Sublett siblings attended the same Methodist Kindergarten. My family lived next door to her Uncle John and Aunt Mariah Nunn (to whom she has dedicated this book) and their three daughters until we moved in 1968. The parts of her memoir that talk about her childhood in Galax have a familiarity to me that is uniquely personal, and yet it could be the story of many small rural towns in the 1960s and 70s.

As I listened her memoir unfold, it also brought to mind a famous quote from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

I can’t speak for other people’s relationship to food, but in my family, when we think of our best childhood memories, food always has a central role. Is that just a Southern thing? I’m not sure. But the recipes in this book speak to both the dishes of my childhood and the life I live now married to a “foodie.”

She talks about making Morning Custard at the Bluebird Café in Athens, GA, when she was a student at the University of Georgia, and that reminded me I had made a video several years ago of my 90 year old Tia Sylvia showing my sister and I how to make our Granny’s baked custard. Does this happen in all families? I have no way of knowing. Emily’s memoir, centered around food, family dysfunction and failed relationships resonated with me.

My daughter Emily called me tonight to ask me recipe questions – she can’t make out her Grandma Sublett’s handwriting on her signature meatloaf recipe. In a meandering conversation about her childhood, she observed that sometimes she wonders if she and her sister Allison actually lived in the same house because they remember things so differently. That was a real “aha” moment for me. As one of five children myself, I’m sure we each experienced our lives in the same family and household quite differently.

That is a significant point that I don’t want to overlook. This is Emily Nunn’s story of her life the way she experienced it. It’s not up for a vote on “right or wrong” or “good or bad” nor is it anyone else’s story but her own. Her relationships with her family, fiancee and friends are relayed to the reader as she lived them. It’s not about them . . . it’s about her relationship with them. This is her journey. She owns it and she’s sharing it through this memoir. Writing a book about the most personal aspects of your life is likely quite cathartic and satisfying on a number of levels. The vulnerability required to then look at reviews written by friends, colleagues and total strangers about that book, is beyond anything I can imagine. That takes strength and fortitude I’m not sure I have.

After hearing the wonderful audiobook version of The Comfort Food Diaries, my husband Tom ordered the hardcopy book so we would have the recipes. It was a glorious experience to hear Emily’s descriptions of dishes, meals and so many aspects of food preparation while sitting in a traffic backup on I-81 in Virginia. We’ll always remember where we were when we heard her talk about Cathy’s mother’s Sour Cherry Pie, which I knew immediately was the book’s cover photo.

Spending time with this book, experiencing it with someone I wanted to understand the people and places contained in its pages, was a beautiful thing. Life is about the journey. We need to embrace it all – it’s what we have. My heart aches for the loss of Emily’s brother, as my heart aches for the loss of my own brother – who, quite ironically, was born the same day in the same hospital as her cousin Toni Nunn. My dad was the hospital administrator. Because that’s how life was in Galax in the 1960s.

I highly recommend this book. It’s unique. It’s thoughtful and hopeful and real. And the recipes are out of this world wonderful!

by Catherine Read

The Power of Moments – Chip and Dan Heath

(Oct 2017) I read Chip and Dan Heath’s first book, Made to Stick, months after it was published in 2007. I am still recommending that book to people today for it’s exceptional concepts and the way in which those ideas are presented.

The Heath brothers have created another extraordinary book with The Power of Moments and I am again evangelizing about the value of what they have to say. I love the way they write. There is an easy and natural humor in these pages that has been in all the books they’ve written. The subject matter can be substantive without being tedious, pedantic or dry in its presentation. Actually, that is one of the central themes of this book – creating memorable moments – peaks.

Creating a peak has four essential elements, although not every peak may have all four. They are Elevation, Pride, Insight and Connection. Peaks will have one or more of these elements. One of the hallmarks of a Chip and Dan Heath book is the well researched case studies explained in an engaging and memorable way. Presenting these elements through real life stories well told is one of the true delights of reading this book.

From the first paragraph on page one, they demonstrate how one powerful moment of recognition can lead to the creation of powerful moments that are intentionally created to be life changing. Two guys are sitting in a pub watching National Signing Day on ESPN in 2000. Not any two guys, two educators running a start-up charter school called YES Prep in Houston. Their “aha moment” came when they asked themselves why there wasn’t similar excitement around academic achievement, not just sports. And then they answered their own question by creating Senior Signing Day at their school where the faculty, all the students and senior’s family members gathered in the auditorium (later moved to the arena at Rice University) to watch seniors march across the stage to “reveal” what college they would be attending after graduation.

There are so many wonderful examples of how the ordinary can become the extraordinary with some creative thought and a change of perspective. The Hillsdale High School “Trial of Human Nature” is such an inspired idea. One of the standout concepts in that chapter is the recognition that the process of education can seem like an endless practice without a culmination (See: All Practice, No Game?). Unlike sports, where you practice toward the goal of playing a competitive game with a definitive outcome, academic study is a process that goes on and on with few peaks to provide a payback for the effort. The annual “Trial of Human Nature” has become a peak – for the students, teachers and other members of the community.Read More

by Catherine Read

Rabbit: The Autobiography of Ms. Pat

(Oct. 2017) When folks think about the problems of growing up in the hood, they think about what it must feel like to be poor, or hungry, or to have your lights cut off. The struggle nobody talk about is what it feel like to be invisible, or to know it in your heart nobody cares. Mama didn’t want to be famous, she wanted to be seen.

That realization came to Patricia Williams as she began her career as a comedian in Indianapolis in 2010. This audiobook, read by the author, is remarkable on so many levels. Her nickname Rabbit was given to her as a child. The name she uses professionally, Ms. Pat, is what her children’s friends called her. She spent much of her life thinking she had nothing in common with her alcoholic mother who died at 39. Then she realized when she went on stage to do stand up comedy that she also craved to be seen, acknowledged and heard.

She gives her listeners/readers an unvarnished truth about her life that few of us could imagine – growing up in abject poverty with a mother who taught her to roll drunks in her grandfather’s “liquor house” when she was 7. She and her sister Sweetie were molested as children by a friend of their mother’s, and both sisters ended up pregnant as teenagers. Rabbit had her first child at 13 and another at 14. She dropped out of middle school to raise her kids, discovering she could support them pretty well by selling crack – the drug that held Atlanta’s poor neighborhoods in its grip in the 1990’s.

Rabbit did a stint in jail for drug possession with intent to distribute. It meant her two young children were left in the care of their daddy Derrick’s family. Her daughter started her first day of kindergarten while she was in jail. When she got out, she went back to selling drugs – a risky employment but one that supported her kids and allowed her to also help her mother out. It also got her shot at one point.

Along the way, she meets people who help her navigate her teenage years and early 20s. A turning point was finally cutting Derrick loose, which made it possible for her to meet Michael. This man helped her to raise her two children, as well as her sister’s four children for 10 years while Sweetie was in and out of rehab. Then they had two children of their own. It was Michael’s job transfer from Atlanta that put them into the mostly white suburbs of Indianapolis, Indiana.

Doing comedy was not something Rabbit had thought about, but she walks us through all of her failed attempts to get a “regular” job, which was nearly impossible because of her felony record that turned up in background checks. She had gotten her GED, invested money in vocational training, and THEN discovered she would likely never be hired to work in the field for which she had received a certification.

Her first foray into comedy was simply standing up at open mic nights at a local club and telling stories about her life in the hood. She quickly discovered that “it turns out comedy and selling drugs have a lot in common. You have to be quick, work hard and give people what they want.” She also discovered something else from the people who came up to talk to her after her performances.

All those times mama told me white folks were better than me, had me thinkin’ white people all live the easy life. But that woman isn’t the only one who has come up to me after a show to tell me about her shitty childhood, or her drug addicted parents. I was a grown woman before I found out black folks aren’t the only ones who had hard times. Everybody got a struggle. Nobody get through this life easy.

She started opening for another comic at clubs that had a largely black audience. As she honed her material, other comedians started to give her opportunities to work with them as well, and then her big break came when she was asked by Marc Maron to be a guest on his WTF podcast. She’s now been a guest on a number of his podcasts and that has led to bookings at clubs around the country.

While I’m sure the printed book is wonderful, I wouldn’t trade the experience of this woman telling me her story for anything. It’s a remarkable journey of resilience with a happy ending. While her early life is far from unique, in fact it’s all too common in many poor communities, her ability to find her way forward out of all of that is a true odyssey, well told.

You can follow Patricia Williams and where she is appearing on Twitter @ComedienneMsPat

by Catherine Read

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class

(Sept. 2017) The aspirational class members make decisions and establish norms that have far more pernicious outcomes for society than did previous leisure-class consumerism. Rather than buying silver spoons and going on long holidays, their investments in education, health, retirement, and parenting ensure the reproduction of status (and often wealth too) for their offspring in a way that no material good can. Through this reproduction of cultural capital and its trappings we see the emergence of what Charles Murray has called the “New Upper Class” and “New Lower Class,” which is not simply an economic divide, but is also a deep cultural divide that has never existed with such distinction as it does today.

I see an emerging body of work from various sources that have common threads running through them pointing to this same conclusion. J.D. Vance, in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, describes his dawning realization that the other students around him at Yale Law School knew things about how the world worked that he had no idea about. The world in which those other students lived might be located in the United States, but it was a world way from where Vance grew up in the economically depressed Middletown, Ohio.

The author, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, is a social scientist who has taken a great deal of research, data and anecdotal information and weaved it into a highly readable book meant for the general public. I applaud both the rigorous academic research necessary to formulate credible theories and also the academic who can then take that information and make it digestible for non-academic consumption. In order to talk about the bigger issues, we all have to understand the concepts and have a shared vocabulary to do so.

The book begins with the well known research and writing of Thorstein Veblen around the “conspicuous consumption” of the “leisure class.” She then walks us through the evolution of mass production and the democratization of consumer purchasing that removed the status symbols and brands that formerly marked the elite. What has replaced it is “inconspicuous consumption” among those with economic means to have more choices.

Conspicuous consumption among the rich has been replaced by “inconspicuous consumption”—spending on nonvisible, highly expensive goods and services that give people more time and, in the long term, shape life chances. These include education, health care, child care, and labor-intensive services like nannies, gardeners, and housekeepers.

I found the examination of breast-feeding to be particularly illuminating. That particular topic fits within the larger scope of “intensive mothering,” which is also part of this “inconspicuous consumption” that I have seen evolve in my lifetime. Without mandated paid leave benefits in this country for new mothers, women in better paying professional careers with companies that voluntarily provide those benefits have options in their parenting choices that other women simply don’t have.

As the journalist Hannah Rosen calculates, “Let’s say a baby feeds seven times a day and then a couple more times at night. That’s nine times for about a half hour each, which adds up to more than half of a working day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is ‘free,’ I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.

Those with the economic means to have choices, are choosing to invest in the future of their children. That leaves behind those families without the economic means to have choices, and creates this widening gap of cultural differences that carry over from one generation to the next.

Having economic means to make a wider range of choices has also given rise to what Currid-Halkett terms “conspicuous production.” From organic vegetables at farmers markets, to the artisanal farm to cup production of Intelligentsia Coffee, cultural capital is created in the choices we make. Where Starbucks made its fortune in bringing luxury to the masses, Intelligentsia makes its (smaller) fortune proclaiming its rarity. What drives the economic model in paying more for a product or service is how that feeds our personal narrative about who we are, what our priorities are, and how we see the world. Consumers’ desire for these less ostentatious forms of consumption is crucial to conspicuous production’s success.

There are themes in this book that intersect with those of Dream Hoarders by Brookings Senior Fellow Richard V. Reeves. That’s why I see this emerging body of work around cultural and economic issues as providing various threads that woven together give us a clearer picture of where we are and potentially where we are headed. There was even a reference in this book to The Primates of Park Avenue, which also looks at many of these same issues from a very different narrative perspective. Awareness is the first step in having a productive discussion about wealth gaps, education gaps, the lack of true social mobility and what seems to be the shrinking of America’s middle class.

This book is a good read. It will likely make you more self aware about your own lifestyle choices, along with heightening your awareness about the choices of those around you. It’s a fascinating look at the times we are living in.

by Catherine Read

Braving the Wilderness – Brené Brown

(Sept. 2017) True belonging doesn’t require that you change who you are. It requires you to be who you are.

This is another amazing book by Dr. Brené Brown, who previously wrote The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, and Rising Strong.” She talks about writing this book against the backdrop of polarizing political and ideological chaos. In looking at some other reviews of this book, I am not surprised that there are people who are dismissive of the book based on their beloved writer having the audacity to “be political.” Which ironically is a wonderful illustration of the points this book sets out to make about true belonging and braving the wilderness.

Dr. Brown defines belonging as “an innate desire to be a part of something larger than us.” She goes on to say that our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self acceptance, and that being ourselves sometimes means standing alone.

Fitting in is not the same as belonging – in fact it can often be a barrier to it. One of the most poignant parts of the book is when she quotes groups of middle school students who came up with their own distinctions between these two concepts:

“Belonging is being somewhere you want to be, and they want you. Fitting in is being somewhere you want to be, but they don’t care one way or the other.”

“Belonging is being accepted for you. Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else.”

“If I get to be me, I belong. If I have to be like you, I fit in.”

She also goes on to talk about how some of these students share a sense of not belonging at home, how they feel like they aren’t living up to their parents’ expectations. Dr. Brown had her own experience of feeling disconnected from her family and points out that “not belonging in our families is still one of the most dangerous hurts. That’s because it has the power to break our heart, our spirit and our sense of self worth.”

She talks about four elements of true belonging and how the daily practice of these things can feel like a paradox. But a paradox is not inherently a bad thing. It requires us to consider two things simultaneously that may seem to be in conflict, or impossible to do at the same time. Her four elements:

People are hard to hate close-up. Move in.
Speak truth to bullshit. Be civil.
Hold hands. With strangers.
Strong back, soft front, wild heart.

She spends some time talking about bullshit as being a greater enemy of truth than even lies are. “Lying is a defiance of the truth. Bullshitting is a wholesale dismissal of the truth.”

She also uses BRAVING as an outline for what it takes in order to trust others. And also to engage in self trust.

B – Boundaries
R – Reliability
A – Accountability
V – Vault (keeping confidences and not speaking out of turn)
I – Integrity
N – Non-judgement (ask for what you need and accept what others need without judging them)
G – Generosity (not jumping to negative assumptions about the intention of others)

I admit that I am a fan of Dr. Brené Brown and love her other books. I’m just as enthusiastic about this one and think the subject is very timely. There are going to be people who don’t like some of her positions and perspectives because it does not align with their beliefs. She talks about Black Lives Matter and why All Lives Matter is not the same. She explains it’s not the same “because the humanity was not stripped from all lives the way it was from the lives of black citizens.” That you can’t undo that level of dehumanization in one or two generations. She goes on to say that it’s possible to care about the lives of police officers and the lives of black citizens and we should not be drawn into false dichotomies of either/or that seek “to shame us for not hating the right people.”

I am passionate in my belief that you can’t simply “opt out” of politics as if it’s something that doesn’t touch you. It touches everyone – it’s the foundation of how public policy is made and that creates the quality of life we have – for better or for worse. Abdicating interest, knowledge and participation in politics gives all your power to someone else – whose intentions and goals may not align with yours. In a democracy, everyone needs to be an informed participant.

I highly recommend this book. It provides excellent food for thought and some very practical suggestions for how to find belonging, even when that means standing alone.

by Catherine Read

Ghost of the Innocent Man – Benjamin Rachlin

(Sept. 2017) What a remarkable book. The entire gripping story is gleaned from 25 years worth of notes, transcripts, forms, files, interviews and testimony. No one’s name has been changed because it’s all a matter of public record. If transparency is what you want, then this style of non-fiction investigative journalism will deliver that on every page.

The book starts off telling two stories: The conviction of Willie James Grimes in 1989 for a rape in Hickory, NC; and the formation of North Carolina’s Innocence Inquiry Commission (NCIIC) which is the first and ONLY commission of its kind in the entire United States. In ten years, the NCIIC has exonerated 10 wrongly convicted inmates.

The chapters alternate between the two stories, which converge when inmate Willie Grimes eventually connects with Christine Mumma, who was the driving force behind the formation of the NCIIC. As a young lawyer fresh out of law school clerking for the Chief Justice of North Carolina’s Supreme Court, I. Beverly Lake, Christine began flagging cases that looked like wrongful convictions. She was frustrated by the fact that appeals are only matters of procedural considerations and NOT about actual innocence. She convinces this conservative Judge to work with the liberal academics of North Carolina’s Innocence Project to form a working group that eventual swelled to 30 members from DA offices, sheriff’s departments, police departments, defense attorneys and even members of a victims rights group. It was rocky, contentious, messy and hard. That group was the genesis of The North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence, where Mumma remains its Executive Director.

The story of the birth of the NCIIC is every bit as gripping and frustrating as the wrongful conviction of Willie James Grimes. We know from the beginning of the book that he is innocent of this crime of rape which happened in Hickory, NC, in 1988. This was at a time when DNA testing was in its infancy and not used as a primary tool in crime investigations. Willie Grimes is convicted based on the testimony of the 69 year old victim and the testimony of a specialist in hair identification – which would later be totally discredited as a reliable tool for identifying perpetrators.

The author, Benjamin Rachlin, walks us through incompetencies at every level – in excruciating detail – from the initial investigation of the crime, to Willie’s many moves among multiple prisons for no apparent reason, to psychiatric reports that are breathtaking in their presumptions, misinformation and misdiagnosis.

The inhumanity of the criminal justice system screams from every page. And the author is simply relaying the information contained in volumes of reports about every tiny aspect of Willie’s life inside the North Carolina prison system. It’s also a walk through 25 years of pharmacology in the U.S. This man entered prison taking no medications whatsoever, and the list of prescription medications and the amounts he was given in the almost 25 years he was a prison is mind boggling. The fact that he had advanced prostate cancer that was overlooked despite constant medical supervision is just one of a long list of incompetencies that plagued this man’s life.

This book is simultaneously infuriating and frustrating and also incredibly inspiring. What happened to Willie Grimes is not some rare case. Far from it. As of March 2017, there have been over 2,000 exonerations in the U.S. – at least one in every state. And that is the tip of the iceberg. Keep in mind that the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission has no counterpart in any other state. There are Innocence Projects scattered across the country doing what work they can, and there are some Conviction Integrity Offices working under District Attorneys in various cities and counties. But the North Carolina Legislature formed this commission and FUNDED this commission and gave them legal authority to decide if a convicted defendant is actually innocent.

The protagonists in this book are Willie J. Grimes and Christine Mumma. Where their stories converge is the heart of this book. The NCIIC decided to investigate his case – a fascinating look at how they conducted that investigation – and then made their case to the 8 member commission which voted unanimously to send it to a 3 judge panel. After living every minute with Willie in prison, and watching the machinations of Christine to invent something that had never been done before, I think I held my breath through the last chapters of the book.

This book is so real. The writing is excellent. Benjamin Rachlin masterfully weaves all this “information” into a compelling story. And he’s not in it. That is the other remarkable aspect of this book – the absence of the writer’s presence. That is a talent not to be overlooked. I’m not sure a lesser writer could have turned 24 years of prison reports into a page turner of a book. This author did that.

I love this book. It makes me crazy to think that we have allowed this to go on. It makes me crazy to think that after a decade of showing the effectiveness of this kind of commission that NO OTHER STATE has followed North Carolina. Why? Do we really not care enough about the integrity of our system of justice to warrant replicating a proven model that has saved the wrongly convicted from death row and life sentences? WTF?

Read this book and then get really really mad. Get up on your high horse and take a wild ride to your state capitol and advocate for your legislature to DO THIS THING!

by Catherine Read

Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

(Sept 2017) This book is extraordinary – as is the woman who wrote it. One of the great strengths of the book is how it weaves staggering facts and statistics about mass incarceration into Susan Burton’s deeply personal story. Each chapter begins with facts about different aspects of our criminal justice system, and the sprawling prison-industrial-complex, that are impacting generations of American families.

Sixty-five million Americans with a criminal record face a total of 45,000 collateral consequences that restrict everything from employment, professional licensing, child custody rights, housing, student aid, voting and even the ability to visit an incarcerated loved one. Many of these restrictions are permanent, forever preventing those who’ve already served their time from reaching their potential in the workforce, as parents, and as productive citizens.

“The result is that these collateral consequences become a life sentence harsher than whatever sentence a court actually imposed upon conviction.” American Bar Association president William C. Hubbard

While factual information like that sets up the framework for each chapter of this book, it is Susan’s narrative that breathes life into what this means for the people who are caught up in this revolving door of poverty, trauma and incarceration.

Knowing that 90% of incarcerated women have suffered some form of sexual abuse or physical violence isn’t the same as hearing what that means when it is described from the point of view of a 3 year old, a ten year and a 14 year old rape victim now a mother. This is how Susan Burton’s life began. A teenaged prostitute, she was befriended by a bail bondsman name George who would be with her for 30 years – encouraging her to be the person he knew she could be. He was there from the lowest points of her life – working the streets, drug addiction, losing her son to a police van hitting him in the streets, forgery and theft to feed her drug habit – to the point at which she decided to get sober, get clean and start over. When she was named a Top Ten CNN Hero in 2010, she called him out by name at the awards event.

In 2012, she was named Encore’s Purpose Prize winner. In 2014, she received the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award, and in 2015 the Los Angeles Times named her one of the nation’s 18 New Civil Rights Leaders.

Susan’s journey is remarkable for her ability to re-invent her life as an “ex-con” at the age of 46. It was a series of happenstance and circumstance that created opportunities for her to finally divert into a drug rehab program instead of back to prison. When she finally found the program CLARE in Santa Monica that got her into AA’s 12 Step Program, she was on her way to a new life.

There were many remarkable people that helped her along the journey to what would become “A New Way of Life,” a re-entry program for formerly incarcerated women in the Watts area of Los Angeles. This part of the book resonates with me because of my work with a re-entry program for women here in Alexandria, Virginia, called Friends of Guest House. Susan forged ahead with her vision of providing other women the help they needed to start their lives over after stepping off the prison bus. She did it herself, and she was determined to do it for others.

The impact of our broken criminal justice system on generations of families is a cycle that seems to have no end. The poverty, the trauma, the lack of educational and economic opportunities, is just compounded when millions of people are saddled with a lifetime of restrictions because of a criminal record. The impact on our country cannot be overstated – it’s tearing at the fabric of our culture and our economy. Something must be done and it will only be done when more people are motivated by the injustice of our criminal justice system.

I would highly recommend this book to every reader, and it would be a particularly excellent book club choice. These are issues more people need to be talking about. Individually, we can be the voice advocating for change, and together we can move the needle on taking back our country from a broken system of justice that feeds mass incarceration and dooms future generations.

by Catherine Read

The Hate U Give – Angie Thomas

(Sept 2017) Pac said Thug Life stood for “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody. T-H-U-G-L-I-F-E. Meaning what society gives us as youth, it bites them in the ass when we wild out. Get it? Khalil explains this to Starr as they are riding in his car. A short time later they are pulled over by a cop, and Khalil becomes a statistic – another unarmed black American gunned down by a cop.

This book spoke to my heart. The characters, the families, the relationships – had such a ring of authenticity to them. It’s hard to imagine that Starr and her family and friends don’t actually exist out there somewhere. Or perhaps they actually do exist and author Angie Thomas brought them to the pages of this book so those of us who do not inhabit their world would know them more intimately.

This book is categorized as “Young Adult” fiction, but it should be read by everyone over the age of 12. When I read books like this I wonder why these timely and relevant works have not replaced some of the dated and less relevant books being taught in classrooms everywhere. Literature does in fact influence culture and perspective. It’s time we were more selective about choosing books that are both great works of literature and compelling in their own right to the young people reading them.

I’ve read that the author was inspired by the music of Tupac Shakur – which factors into the book in a beautiful way – as well as by the Black Lives Matter movement. This book takes us inside communities most of us will never see. It gives a vividly constructed backstory to the newspaper headlines we see on a regular basis proclaiming that yet another unarmed African-American has been killed by police. We have come to expect exactly how it will play out – an investigation, a hearing, possibly a trial, and at the end no cop will be charged.

I highly recommend this book. I loved every minute I spent with these characters. Their lives are real and it’s the realness of their situation that makes you hold your breath and fear what will come next. We should feel the same way about the real people in this country that we feel about the characters in this book. We need to care more and we need to do more to protect the lives of black people in our communities.

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