Tag: social justice

nonfiction

Book Review: We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys by Erin Kimmerle

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A few years back, I remember hearing about the Dozier School for Boys and the absolutely horrifying allegations of abuse that occurred there. There have been a few books that have come out about this place that I’m aware of, and I’ve always felt like I needed to read at least one of them, so when I heard about We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys by Erin Kimmerle (William Morrow, 2022), I added it to my TBR. 

In recent years, former students and family members of former students of Florida’s Dozier School for Boys have begun to step forward and demand justice for the terrible abuse suffered at the hands of the guards, teachers, and administration. Beatings, starvation, rape and sexual abuse, and murder were all regular occurrences, not that the state of Florida would admit any of this, but the still-traumatized former students and the families of students who never came home know the truth. Forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle steps in to lead a search of the grounds, and the results are far more shocking than anyone could have predicted.

Even getting permission to search the grounds – doing scans of the ground to see if there’s even anything there, zero disturbing of the dirt – is fraught with bureaucracy. The local court system foils the investigators at every turn. Townspeople, whose livelihoods and local economy depended on the school for years, are loath to admit that anything was ever amiss with the school or its employees. Congressmen and congresswomen and the then-governor have to step in (thank goodness this took place under a completely different governor, because I’m fairly certain today that the survivors’ search for justice would be scoffed at as being too ‘woke’ to do anything about, sigh). And when Ms. Kimmerle and her team are finally able to begin their work, it turns out that more boys died at the hands of adults at the Dozier School for Boys than any paperwork mentions. 

This all makes for a very intriguing story, but to be honest, I found the writing a little dull. It plods on with a ton of detail about the archaeology, like, absolutely massive amounts of detail, which, to a lay person like me, didn’t much hold my interest. I’m more here for the emotional side of things: how did all of this affect the survivors and the families whose children went missing while at this school? What does the townspeople’s attitudes do to them? How does the search and the exhausting amount of bureaucracy affect the author? I wanted more of that and less description of machinery and equipment. I did learn some fascinating facts about how to tell when the earth has been disturbed, though, which is something I never really thought about before, so I definitely appreciated that.

Fascinating story, but the telling of it was bogged down a little too much with technical details for me to really connect with it. 

Visit Erin Kimmerle’s website here.

nonfiction

Book Review: The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives by Dashka Slater

Stephanie3 Comments

Book friends are really the best, aren’t they? A few weeks ago, in our weekly ‘what are you reading’ book discussion, a friend said she was reading The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives by Dashka Slater (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017). I checked it out on Goodreads and immediately clicked the want-to-read button, because the premise so intrigued me, and on a recent trip to the library with my oldest child, who has been doing a lot of reading from the YA section lately, I grabbed a copy of this book from the small YA nonfiction section. And I wasn’t disappointed. If you’ve ever thought that crime was cut and dry, black and white, lock them up and throw away the key because crime is committed by horrible people, this is a book that will have you reconsidering everything you thought you knew.

Sasha, an agender teenager, was riding the bus home from school one day when another teenager, Richard, who was getting rowdy with and being egged on by friends, lit their skirt on fire, thinking it would only smolder before waking Sasha up, and that this would be a good prank. Instead, Sasha’s gauzy skirt lit up, leaving them with second and third-degree burns over something like a third of their body. Richard is arrested and charged with a hate crime, tried as an adult despite the fact that he was a teenager, and in a way that leaves him facing life in prison. But the story isn’t as simple as ‘this kid committed a hate crime, lock him up and throw away the key.’ Dashka Slater does an amazing job of taking a hard look at a lot of complex topics, and she does it all in a way that’s accessible to teens learning to understand these issues.

Heavy subjects here. A good portion of the book deals with gender and gender identity; Ms. Slater was learning about the topic herself and lays everything out in a way that’s easy to understand. Sasha was lucky to be born into a family and community of people who accepted them for who they were, amongst a crowd of friends who rallied around them and loved them unconditionally. Richard, who grew up in a family and a community mired in poverty and violence, wasn’t so fortunate (to be entirely honest, his family seemed completely normal; I really felt for his mother while reading this); the choices we as a society make about poverty and who deserves what lead to communities beleaguered by the problems Richard’s community faces. We also compound the problem by immediately absolving ourselves as a society of any responsibility for these problems and the crime they so often lead to, and this is obvious in the way that Richard was quickly charged as an adult, with life in prison on the line. We also like to discount the science of brain development and ignore the fact that teenage brains are not adult brains. They make stupid, shitty, impulsive decisions because their brains are literally not yet fully formed. It’s like sending your newborn to their room without dinner because they waved an arm they’re not fully in control of and hit you in the face. We all know it takes babies a few months to even figure out they can willfully move their arms and hands around and use them with purpose; teenage brains are the same in terms of development, but instead of understanding this and incorporating that knowledge into our society, we’ve turned that completely normal underdevelopment into a problem for which the only solution is throwing the whole teenager away.

The strength of Sasha and their family in this book is enormous; their understanding and willingness to look beyond their own pain and the media’s narrative is remarkable. I’m not sure I would be so quick to understand or move on, honestly; I like to think I *could* get there, but it would take some work. The pain and bewilderment of Richard’s friends and family was a lot to read about. They were confused, still struggling with the realities of their everyday lives while trying to figure out why Richard did what he did and trying to be supportive while he fought to even have a future at all. 

This was just so sad and hard to read, and Ms. Slater does such a fabulous job of illustrating the depth of problems in our society surrounding all the issues covered in this book: understanding of gender, safety for LGBTQ+ folks, poverty, income disparity, violence, the many, many problems with our justice system, and so much more. I read this all in one day, but it’s a story that will stick with me forever.

Visit Dashka Slater’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America by Alissa Quart

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Sometimes I scroll through Twitter and it feels like I’m losing my mind. So many people are struggling out there, and it seems like no one in charge gives a damn. It’s why I so consistently read books like Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America by Alissa Quart (Ecco, 2018). I’m just trying to make any kind of sense of what’s going on out there. Though this book was written before the pandemic, it doesn’t back down in showing exactly how bad it was and still is out there. Sadly, not much has changed since its publication.

Life is tough these days, for so many reasons. The rent is too damn high, and it just keeps getting higher. Home ownership is completely out for far too many people, the price of food is ridiculous, and have you HEARD what people are paying for daycare? It’s all too much, and Alissa Quart, who has experienced all of these problems herself, decided to write about it.

Jobs that expect you to work like you don’t have a family. Daycare that costs more than your mortgage and expects you to pick up your kids like your boss lets you out on time and traffic doesn’t exist. Rent that goes up and up and up, even when you haven’t gotten a raise in six years (but your boss has, and the CEO’s pay has doubled in that time!). Families today are squeezed to the max (and yet people are out there screaming, “WHY IS EVERYONE DEPRESSED? WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE CAUSING THIS???”) in almost every area, and it’s affecting every part of our society. Property ownership is down, people are having fewer children, and everyone is struggling.

Alissa Quart does an excellent job of illustrating so many of the areas in which American families are hurting. She highlights a few solutions, but not many, because there just aren’t many good ones. These problems are caused by the top, and the solutions will need to be implemented from the top down, something that still hasn’t happened yet despite even more people struggling than when this book was first written. This does give the book an overall depressing feel – I kept having to put it down to scroll through my phone, because somehow that wasn’t as much of a downer – but it does help to know that it’s not just me who’s seeing this, that the problem is widespread and societal, and it’s not getting the attention it needs. 

Excellent read, if depressing.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row by Anthony Ray Hinton with Lara Love Hardin

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The 2023 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge directed me to read a book from a celebrity book club list, and I was like a deer in the headlights for a moment. I’m not much of a celebrity watcher at all, and honestly, the only time I hear about celebrity book clubs are when other people bring them up, so I had to go digging. I’ve read some of Oprah’s selections in the past, and I’ve heard people talking about Reese Witherspoon’s book club, but that’s still really all I know. The lists I looked at, nothing really jumped out at me, until… I spotted The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row by Anthony Ray Hinton with Lara Love Hardin (St. Martin’s Press, 2018). This was an Oprah selection, and I immediately knew that this was something I had to read. This is one of the most incredible, painful books I’ve ever read about the American “justice” system.

Anthony Ray Hinton was a Black man in Alabama who signed in at work in a warehouse, plenty of people around him. That mattered nothing to the police, who accused him of three murders (one of which was committed during this time Mr. Hinton was at work, the others just tacked on because they were similar), and a jury, who convicted him. Failed over and over again by his court-appointed lawyer and the experts who weren’t as expert as they should’ve been, Ray, as he’s known, is sentenced to death by electric chair. 

Appeal after appeal falls through, and at first, Ray’s anger nearly eats him alive. But then he begins to apply the life lessons his beloved mother taught him to living in such terrible isolation on Death Row, and this change in attitude helps him survive. And then his case was taken up by Bryan Stevenson, of Just Mercy, himself…

Despite Mr. Stevenson, whom I’m convinced has been sent here to do God’s work on earth, finding experts (actual ones, three of them!) to prove that the gun the police pulled out of Ray’s mother’s house couldn’t possibly have been used in the murders Ray was convicted of, it still takes twelve years for Ray to be set free. In all, he spends nearly THIRTY YEARS waiting to be executed for a crime he didn’t commit, listening to his friends make their final walk down the hallway to be murdered by the guards in charge of the men’s everyday lives, smelling their burning flesh wafting on the air for hours after they’re put to death. If that doesn’t enrage you, I’m not sure what will.

This is an absolutely incredible, deeply enraging book. What the state of Alabama did to Mr. Hinton, how it destroyed his life and his family, with what seems like zero remorse, disgusts me to the very depths of my soul. That this is how poor Black men are treated in this country, even when their innocence is able to be proven, PROVEN, is utterly horrifying. Mr. Hinton’s experiences are shocking, but they’re not uncommon: one in every ten people sentenced to death in the United States is innocent. 

I’ll say that again.

One-tenth of the people murdered by the United States government are innocent of the crimes they were accused of.

That is a shocking statistic. If I weren’t already vehemently opposed to the death penalty before reading this, I would definitely be now. The fact that the state of Alabama stole thirty years of Mr. Hinton’s life without so much as an, “Oops, my bad,” and only doubled down, desperate to murder him even when stronger evidence from more qualified experts was presented that he couldn’t possibly have committed these murders, fills me with such rage that I desperately wish I were intelligent enough to become a lawyer and join Bryan Stevenson’s team. They deserve all the help they can get to do the noble work of saving lives from government-sanctioned murder.

This is an utterly incredible book, and I don’t think there was a single page I read that I didn’t want to scream or rage-vomit. I read books to learn about the world, to experience it through other people’s eyes, to feel. This book checks all three categories in spades. Five stars, and I truly hope Mr. Hinton is able to live a calm, quiet life of peace in the wake of such trauma.

Read more about Anthony Ray Hinton’s case at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative.

Visit Lara Love Hardin’s website here.

nonfiction

Book Review: The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Stephanie1 Comment

I admit, as a book person, and as a huge nonfiction book person, when the pandemic first hit, I thought, ‘Man, the books about this time period are going to be fascinating.’ And they’ve started to roll in, and they are indeed fascinating, along with being utterly devastating. The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher (Celadon Books, 2022) is one of those books, and it’ll pull you in and squeeze your heart with both hands.

Dr. Steven Thrasher is both Black and gay; both of these are markers for experiencing more adverse health outcomes. HIV/AIDS hits both these groups at a higher rate than white people, or straight people. There are groups that experience adverse outcomes in much higher rates than others, and Dr. Thrasher examines these, using the AIDS epidemic, the COVID pandemic, and various other viruses throughout history. This isn’t stodgy academic writing; he delves deeply into his own life, his experiences and those of his friends and colleagues, his communities, to drive the point that we have created a society where illness spreads more easily and more surely along class and racial lines. It doesn’t have to be like this…but try telling that to the people at the top of this hierarchy and see how fast they riot when there’s no one from those lower classes to serve them at Applebee’s. We’ve seen this type of behavior all throughout the pandemic. Members of the viral underclass are more likely to have public-facing jobs and cannot isolate or work from home, and we as a society demand they get back there as soon as possible. And thus, they die at much higher rates, and we as a society see this, shrug, and await their replacements.

This is a sobering book, and it needs to be read by everyone. I can’t vouch for other countries, since I’ve only ever lived in the US, but here, we’re all so disconnected from each other. We stick to our circles and don’t engage with people outside of them, and thus, we don’t understand the devastation caused by this stratification of society, outside of, “Huh, wonder where that one guy that worked at the gas station went. Haven’t seen him in months. Anyway…” Dr. Thrasher has really written an eye-opening account of how blasé we are a society of throwing away people who aren’t like us. It’s a major wake-up call, one I’m not hopeful that the majority of us will hear.

Visit Dr. Steven Thrasher’s page at Celadon books here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration from the Front Lines by Efrén C. Olivares

Stephanie1 Comment

The absolute horror of the parent-child separations at the border during the Trump administration has stayed with me. I cannot even begin to fathom the horror, the terror, and the fear that this must have caused parents and their children (infants! Even nursing infants!!!), and the lasting trauma this is still causing. I knew as soon as I learned about My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration from the Front Lines by Efrén C. Olivares (Hachette Books, 2022), I needed to read it. These are stories that need to be heard.

Efrén Olivares was born in and grew up in Mexico, moving to the US with his mother and siblings to live with his father (who had citizenship) during his middle school years. His was a life of not just poverty, but of family togetherness, of parents who worked way harder than they should’ve had to in order to provide Efrén and his siblings with opportunities, but who also provided them with examples of hard work and humanity. Efrén grew up to become a lawyer, and, as it turned out, one who helped fight to document the atrocities at the border perpetuated by the Trump administration.

He and his very small team interviewed the separated parents, getting what information they could on paper so that hopefully, the parents and children could be reunited at some point in the future. This wasn’t an easy or simple task; they weren’t given time or space for this and were frantically trying to interview detained migrants in the small bits of time before court proceedings began. These were desperate parents who had no idea where their children were: if they were safe, if they were being taken care of, WHO was taking care of them, if they would ever see their children again. Mr. Olivares and his team used the information they collected to reunite some of these parents with their children; he alternates their stories with his own story of immigration, pointing out that there’s no real difference: anyone who leaves one place for another is only looking for a better life.

An absolute heart-wrenching book. The descriptions of the parents’ tears, of how they’d cry and barely manage to speak at all is soul-crushing. It drives home the purposeful cruelty of not just the previous administration but of the American government as a whole throughout history. This isn’t a new story; we have a foul history of separating parents and children, and imprisoning them, for a multitude of reasons (orphan trains, anyone? Those weren’t all orphans; many of them were just children of poor parents. Japanese internment camps? Can we please just start calling them what they were, which is American concentration camps? We hold no moral upper hand at any point in time). Efrén’s story of his youth and the work it led him to as an adult is moving, and I think it’s the responsibility of all Americans to read stories like this, to look at who Americans (those born here and those who became American later in life) really are, to find the humanity in these people and in themselves, because it’s only by viewing others through the same lens as we view ourselves that we can stop treating other people as less-than.

A moving, painful read, but a necessary one. I’m so thankful there are people out there like Mr. Olivares, who have both the necessary credentials and the heart it takes to see such injustice and to do something about it.

Read Efrén C. Olivares‘s profile at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website.

nonfiction

Book Review: Consumed: On Colonization, Climate Change, Consumerism, and the Need for Collective Change by Aja Barber

Stephanie1 Comment

I’m not a minimalist – you’d laugh if you see how overrun with stuff I am – but my mindset is definitely heading that way. I rarely buy things that take up permanent residence in my house (books being the one exception, of course, and then most of them are read and passed on). It’s because of all of the reading I’ve done over the past ten-plus years about how bad capitalism has been for the planet. We’re trashing it at an insane rate, and the fast fashion industry is a massive part of the problem. I need that constant reminder to keep up my ‘you don’t actually need that’ mindset, so that’s how Consumed: On Colonialism, Climate Change, Consumerism, and the Need for Collective Change by Aja Barber (Brazen, 2021) ended up on my TBR. Thanks to interlibrary loan, it landed at my house a few weeks ago. It’s an intense read, with a lot of information, but despite the immediacy of its message, it’s also a fun one.

Aja Barber understands your love of fashion, because she feels it too. She loves clothes, she’s worked in the fashion industry, she gets the pull of a new outfit making you into someone new. But she’s also come to understand the environmental and human damage the industry causes: the waste, the mounds of trash produced every single second, the ooze poured into rivers, the overworked, sexually harassed garment workers, the damage caused to their lungs from inhaled fabric particles and chemicals, the low pay, the death that comes from fires and collapse of poorly-constructed buildings. If you’re into fast fashion, you’re part of the problem. Aja Barber is here to help you learn how to be part of the solution.

This is such a necessary book. I love that there have been so many excellent books in the past decade that expose the fast fashion industry for the nightmare that it is. Ms. Barber keeps the tone light, however (a few of the Goodreads reviews complain about this, but I think they’re confusing lack of editing with Ms. Barber’s style). Don’t be mistaken, however; this isn’t an easy read. There’s a LOT of information here; some of it is the story of Ms. Barber’s journey from fashion fan to fashion industry critic (and yet still a fan! We SHOULD be critical of the things we love!), but the rest is about the dangers of the industry, and the devastation. It’s something all consumers should be aware of, so we can make the most responsible choices possible every time we open our wallets.

Visit Aja Barber’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America by Ryan Busse

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I had the privilege of attending a virtual presentation a few weeks ago featuring author and activist Ryan Busse, discussing the US’s massive gun violence problem and his book, Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America (PublicAffairs, 2021). I hadn’t been able to get a copy of his book before the talk, but it came in soon after and mirrored a lot of what he spoke about in his presentation. He shared slides, some of which came from testimony he’s given to Congress (like half of them care…), and all of it was shocking and terrifying, like so much in this book.

Ryan Busse grew up loving the outdoors. His father taught his brother and him to hunt and fish, but he shared with them the importance of handling guns safety, and that no gun was worth a human life. Thanks to his strong ties to hunting as a child, Ryan grew up wanting to work in the gun industry and made that happen for himself, securing a position with Kimber and helping the company grow exponentially over his time there.

But Ryan’s goals for the company and where the NRA was steering the firearms industry as a whole began to diverge along the way. Whereas Ryan stood by the values of safety and nature conservation he’d grown up with, the radicalization and violence fetishization the industry pushed, along with its commitment to toxic masculinity and profits above human lives, alienated and horrified him. For years, he fought back from the inside, until the damage was too much for one man to even begin to control.

This is quite a damning look at the firearms industry as a whole and how the NRA has poisoned it along with American politics, and has fanned the flames of xenophobia, racism, toxic masculinity, and violence as a whole, all under the guise of making money. “Who benefits from this?” is an important question to ask when you’re consuming social media of politicians and reporters who are doing their best to drum up fear; the answer is very often the firearms industry, as more and more Americans purchase more and more guns and weapons. It’s a disturbing, sickening industry with no morals or integrity, and it makes me ashamed that we as a country let this happen.

I’m not a gun person; I have no interest in them (I’ve been shooting multiple times in my life and I’m actually a pretty good shot, but it’s not a hobby I’m interested in pursuing), and I can’t say this book did anything to make me more interested in guns as a whole, despite Ryan’s obvious respectful fascination (I did appreciate his devotion to conservation and protecting the lands he obviously cherishes, however!). If you’re not into guns, you should definitely know there’s a lot of information in here about them. I can’t say I’m any better informed about makes and models, but I am walking away with a much better look at how dark the gun industry has become in the US, and how they’re a massive part of the problem, if not the majority of how and why we’re where we are today in the US. It’s shameful, but I’m glad to have this understanding now. I wish everyone understood this.

If you’re looking to shed more light on why the US is such a horrific mess, and you want to know how we got here, with mass shootings every ten seconds and no one doing anything about it, look no further. Gunfight by Ryan Busse will explain it all.

Visit Ryan Busse’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: You’re the Only One I’ve Told: The Stories Behind Abortion by Dr. Meera Shah

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Abortion has been in the news lately for obvious reasons, and I wasn’t sure if I had the spoons to read a book about it; it’s not always easy to engage with a subject that’s so important but which is also under assault at the moment. After volunteering with a local organization to pack comfort care bags for our local Planned Parenthood a few weeks ago, however, I was ready to pick up You’re the Only One I’ve Told: The Stories Behind Abortion by Dr. Meera Shah (Chicago Review Press, 2020).  

Dr. Shah is a doctor who provides abortion care to patients who seek it out. Because being able to decide when to become a parent is an important part of bodily autonomy, planning one’s future, and in some cases, remaining alive, she is passionate about her work and seeks to help others understand the importance of what she does. Each chapter focuses on one person who, for varying reasons, chose to end a pregnancy; Dr. Shah includes the important medical knowledge necessary to fully understand each situation, and the difficulties that our national climate surrounding abortion adds to what is already often a tense and heartbreaking decision.

The reasons behind the abortion in each chapter are various and complex; from abusive relationships (who wants to be tied forever to a man who has hurt you multiple times???), to a doomed pregnancy where the baby will live maybe minutes after being born (if it survives that long without killing the parent carrying it), to pregnancies that occurred at the worst possible time, to a pregnancy that would render life next to impossible for the entire rest of the family (“Here, person already struggling to pay the rent for you and your three kids! Here’s another new baby; now you can also add $1200+ per month in daycare fees! I’m sure you can handle that!”), there are so, so many reasons why these women choose abortion, and Dr. Shah is respectful of them all, without judgment. Throughout each chapter, she illustrates and emphasizes the importance of being able to examine one’s life and come to the conclusion that becoming a parent (often becoming a parent again) at this moment cannot happen, and how important it is that this procedure remain legal.

So many heartbreaking decisions in this book. Often, the pregnancies were desperately wanted; nature, however, had other ideas about how the fetus would develop, and the parents were faced with the awful knowledge that there was no chance of them ending up with a child even if the pregnancy were continued. At other times, the parents simply realized that bringing a child into their lives was the worst possible thing they could do at the moment. Being allowed to make that decision allowed them to go on to have the lives they wanted – lives that often included, eventually, having more children.

If you’ve never read a book about abortion and are curious as to what could possibly lead a woman to make the choice to have one, this would be an excellent place to start. I’ve noticed that doctors tend to fall into two camps: either they’re terrible writers, or they’re great. Dr. Shah is one of the great ones; her style is engaging and never wanders into stiffy, stodgy medical writing. Her respect for the people she treats is obvious in her gentle handling of the stories in this book, and it’s obvious her patients are lucky to be served by her.

nonfiction

Book Review: Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America by Peter Edelman

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Poverty is a subject I’ve read a lot about, in vain attempts to understand our societal reaction to it. People are struggling and suffering, and we just…do nothing? And sometimes, we actively make the situation worse, because in the US (and I’m sure in other countries around the world), we see not having money as a moral issue. It was because of this inability to understand the way we view poverty that Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America by Peter Edelman (New Press, 2017) ended up on my TBR. It’s a gut-punch of a book, but if you’re looking to understand exactly how difficult it is to be poor in the US, it’s a sock to the stomach that you need.

In a book reminiscent in tone and in the intellectual heft of Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, Peter Edelman chronicles how poverty is systemic the US: the pointless fees and charges that are meant to keep poor people poor; the next-to-impossible roads necessary to make to climb out of poverty; the punishment that we inflict upon those who are already struggling in an attempt to discipline the poverty out of them. We fill our coffers and profit off the backs of people barely managing, or not managing at all; we see them struggling; we enact more laws and regulations meant to drain their accounts. And the cycle continues.

This isn’t history. What Peter Edelman writes about is here and now: court systems enacting hefty fees and fines, prisons charging for anything and everything they can, law enforcement writing tickets, which come with a heavy price tag, to homeless people. In every way we can, we make it harder to be poor. It’s not all without hope; plenty of people are fighting back, and fighting back hard. But this is a systemic issue; it’s baked in deeply to our laws, our law enforcement, our court systems. But in order to make things better, first, you need to understand just how bad it is, and that’s why you need to read this book.

This is an information-dense book; it’s not something you’re going to want to kick back with after a long day at work when you’re looking for relaxation. Not a Crime to Be Poor is a book you open because you want to understand what’s going on, and because you want to challenge yourself and your preconceived notions. After you turn the final page, you’ll close the book with a righteous sense of anger, a healthy dose of empathy for those who are set up to fail in this wretched system, and hopefully, a strong desire to be part of the solution. Read this book in small chunks if that’s what it takes: a chapter at a time, a few pages a day. This is information that all Americans should be aware of, an understanding we should all have.

Not a Crime to Be Poor throws the curtains open on a reality that far too many of us find it convenient to ignore.