Good Books

A few weeks ago I read Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I definitely would recommend it, and I have a lot of respect for a man or woman who steps up and dedicates their life to helping fix something wrong. Someone who decides to be a stone catcher. It is a problem when justice depends on how good your lawyer is, to say the very least. I don’t accept some of the claims sprinkled in the book, expressed as a matter of obvious fact when in reality they are his opinion or interpretation. But the respect and admiration remains. 

Having read Hillbilly Elegy in the same year (also a major endorsement), I am now devouring the following book written by a psychiatrist in the slums of Britain. He has had thousands of patients in the hospital and prison where he works, and he has collected his many observations in it, topic by topic, all related to what turns the lower class into a lower caste. Just as compelling and heartbreaking as the first two books, with thousands of observed lives to back it up. Similarly with Hillbilly Elegy, the intergenerational poverty and squalor described is of mostly white people. It has been interesting to study class issues in the absence of race. I think it would behoove us all to do so. And I think this man has his finger so squarely on the pulse of cause and effect, I cannot overstate how much I hope anyone seeing this might give this book their time!