Category: Social Justice

I interrupted my summer reading list to cry my way through (very quickly) The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row (Oprah’s Book Club Summer 2018 Selection).

I read and recommend all types of books and sometimes I very strongly recommend books…a recent example is CIRCE...however there are some rare times when I so strongly want to recommend a book that I decide to GIVE ONE AWAY.

So today I have decided to set up a contest to give away a copy of this book by Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent 30 years on Death Row as an innocent man. You may have seen it advertised as Oprah’s Summer selection. I glad it is her book club selection because I hope as many people as possible read this book.

(I will ship a book to the winner anywhere in the continental U.S. – see contest at the bottom of this post.)

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An elegy by definition is “a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead.”

J.D. Vance’s new memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, currently a bestseller and a hot item with a long waiting list at any public library is certainly a serious reflection on his growing up a “hillbilly,” and it does express grief for his grandparents, both for whom I cried real tears while reading this book.

Early on he says the book is about how this culture (Kentucky Appalachia and Ohio Rust Belt) is known for “reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”

Vance can talk about these problems in a way others can’t get away with because he lived through it himself and somehow came out a Yale-educated lawyer.

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