Book Excerpts

Bryan Stevenson

American lawyer, social justice activist, founder/executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and a law professor at New York University School of Law.

“Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

I frequently had difficult conversations with clients who were struggling and despairing over their situations—over the things they’d done, or had been done to them, that had led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lives, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, you are not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer. I told myself that evening what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us. All of sudden, I felt stronger. I began thinking about what would happen if we all just acknowledged our brokenness if we owned up to our weaknesses, our deficits, our biases, our fears. Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t want to kill the broken among us who have killed others. Maybe we would look harder for solutions to caring for the disabled, the abused, the neglected, and the traumatized. I had a notion that if we acknowledged our brokenness, we could no longer take pride in mass incarceration, in executing people, in our deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable.”

Excerpt: Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy, Random House Publishing Group, 2014. 289-290

Victor Davis Hanson

Professor Emeritus of Classics at California State University and Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University's Hoover Institution

“The postwar Allies became captive of their own self-professed idealism. Britain fought as an imperial power that sought to liberate Nazi-occupied nations and give them free elections, a liberality it had not yet extended to its own restless colonies from India to Africa. The United States went to war to extinguish fascist racism and brutality unleashed against those not considered members of the various Axis master races. Yet, the US military itself was a semi-apartheid force, in which blacks could not serve as equals to their white fellow citizens—a reflection of the segregation that plagued much of contemporary America in the 1940s, most prominently in the Old South.

The Anglo-Americans did not present well the more nuanced argument that they were evolving democratic societies, whose natural postwar trajectories would lead to greater self-determination abroad and political equality at home. Such subtleties are difficult to articulate at any time and perhaps impossible in the middle of existential wars. But the resulting reticence to deal with these issues set up the victors as easy targets of national liberationist invective in the decades that followed 1945 and have still fueled constant revisionism.”

Excerpt: Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars, Basic Books, 2017, p.884

Tara Westover

Historian and Author

“When I was a child, I waited for my mind to grow, for my experiences to accumulate and my choices to solidify, taking shape into the likeness of a person. That person, or that likeness of one, had belonged. I was of that mountain, the mountain that had made me. It was only as I grew older that I wondered if how I had started is how I would end—if the first shape a person takes is their only true shape.

As I write the final words of this story, I’ve not seen my parents in years, since my grandmother’s funeral. I’m close to Tyler, Richard, and Tony, and from them, as well as from other families, I hear of the ongoing drama on the mountain—the injuries, violence, and shifting loyalties. But it comes to me now as distant hearsay, which is a gift. I don’t know if the separation is permanent if one day I will find a way back, but it has brought me peace.That peace did not come easily. I spent years enumerating my father’s flaws, constantly updating the tally, as if reciting every resentment, every real and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect, would justify my decision to cut him from my life. Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath.

But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people. I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. The relief came when I turned inward. When I discovered, finally, that the decision could be upheld for my own sake. Because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it. It was the only way I could love him.”

Excerpt: Tara Westover, Educated, Random House Publishing Group, 2018, 327-328

Douglas Murray

Author and Political Commentator

“One of the ways to distance ourselves from the madnesses of our times is to retain an interest in politics but not to rely on it as a source of meaning. The call should be for people to simplify their lives and not to mislead themselves by devoting their lives to a theory that answers no questions, makes no predictions and is easily falsifiable. Meaning can be found in all sorts of places. For most individuals it is found in the love of the people and places around them: in friends, family and loved ones, in culture, place and wonder. A sense of purpose is found in working out what is meaningful in our lives and then orientating ourselves over time as closely as possible to those centres of meaning. Using ourselves up on identity politics, social justice (in this manifestation) and inter­sectionality is a waste of a life.

We may certainly aim to live in a society in which nobody should be held back from what they can do because of some personal characteristic allotted to them by chance. If somebody has the competency to do something, and the desire to do something, then nothing about their race, sex or sexual orientation should hold them back. But minimizing difference is not the same as pretending difference does not exist. To assume that sex, sexuality and skin colour mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything will be fatal.”

Excerpt: Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds, Bloomsbury Publishing, 310-311

Frank Dikötter

Historian, Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, and Author“

Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake Britain in less than fifteen years. By unleashing China’s greatest asset, a labour force that was counted in the hundreds of millions, Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors. Instead of following the Soviet model of development, which leaned heavily towards industry alone, China would ‘walk on two legs’: the peasant masses were mobilised to transform both agriculture and industry at the same time, converting a backward economy into a modern communist society of plenty for all. In the pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised, as villagers were herded together in giant communes which heralded the advent of communism. People in the countryside were robbed of their work, their homes, their land, their belongings and their livelihood. Food, distributed by the spoonful in collective canteens according to merit, became a weapon to force people to follow the parent’s every dictate. Irrigation campaigns forced up to half the villagers to work for weeks on end on giant water-conservancy projects, often far from home, without adequate food and rest. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives.

Between 1958 and 1962 by a rough approximation 6 to 8 per cent of the victims were tortured to death or summarily killed – amounting to at least 2.5 million people. Other victims were deliberately deprived of food and starved to death. Many more vanished because they were too old, weak or sick to work – and hence unable to earn their keep. People were killed selectively because they were rich, because they dragged their feet, because they spoke out or simply because they were not liked, for whatever reason, by the man who wielded the ladle in the canteen. Countless people were killed indirectly through neglect, as local cadres were under pressure to focus on figures rather than on people, making sure they fulfilled the targets they were handed by the top planners.

The portrait that emerges of Mao himself is hardly flattering, and is far removed from the public image he so carefully cultivated: rambling in his speeches, obsessed with his own role in history, often dwelling on past slights, a master at using his emotions to browbeat his way through a meeting, and, above all, insensitive to human loss.

”Excerpt: Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine, Walker Publishing, 2019, 9 and 12

Ron Chernow

Writer, Journalist, Historian, and Biographer

“In truth, Grant was instrumental in helping the Union vanquish the Confederacy and in realizing the wartime ideals enshrined in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The Civil War and Reconstruction formed two acts of a single historical drama to gain freedom and justice for black Americans, and Grant was the major personality who united those two periods. He was the single most important figure behind Reconstruction, and his historical reputation has risen sharply with a revisionist view of that period as a glorious experiment in equal rights for all American citizens instead of a shameful fiasco. What has been critically absent from Grant biographies is a systematic account of his relations with the four million slaves, whom he helped to liberate, feed, house, employ, and arm during the war, then shielded from harm when they became American citizens. Frederick Douglass paired Grant with Lincoln as the two people who had done most to secure African American advances: “May we not justly say . . . that the liberty which Mr. Lincoln declared with his pen General Grant made effectual with his sword—by his skill in leading the Union armies to final victory?” For the admiring Douglass, Grant was “the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race.” More recently the historian Sean Wilentz has ratified this verdict: “The evidence clearly shows that [Grant] created the most auspicious record on racial equality and civil rights of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson. (Troy Intelligence)

The imperishable story of Grant’s presidency was his campaign to crush the Ku Klux Klan. Through the Klan, white supremacists tried to overturn the Civil War’s outcome and restore the status quo ante. No southern sheriff would arrest the hooded night riders who terrorized black citizens and no southern jury would convict them. Grant had to cope with a complete collapse of evenhanded law enforcement in the erstwhile Confederate states. In 1870 he oversaw creation of the Justice Department, its first duty to bring thousands of anti-Klan indictments. By 1872 the monster had been slain, although its spirit resurfaced as the nation retreated from Reconstruction’s lofty aims. Grant presided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave blacks the right to vote, and landmark civil rights legislation, including the 1875 act outlawing racial discrimination in public accommodations. His pursuit of justice for southern blacks was at times imperfect, but his noble desire to protect them never wavered.”

Excerpt: Ron Chernow, Grant, Penguin Publishing Group, 2017, xxii

Kim Michele Richardson

Writer and Novelist

“Inspired by the true and gentle historical blue-skinned people of Kentucky and the brave and dedicated Kentucky Pack Horse librarians born of Roosevelt’s New Deal Acts, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek showcases a fascinating and important footnote of history.”

- Author’s Notes

In writing the novel, my hope was to humanize and bring understanding to the gracious blue-skinned people of Kentucky, to pay tribute to the fearsome Pack Horse librarians—and to write a human story set in a unique landscape. Methemoglobinemia is an extremely rare disease that causes the skin to be blue. In the United States, it was first found in the Fugates of Troublesome Creek in eastern Kentucky. In 1820, Martin Fugate, a French orphan, came to Kentucky to claim a land grant on the banks of Troublesome Creek in Kentucky’s isolated wilderness. Martin married a full-blooded, red-headed, white-skinned Kentuckian named Elizabeth Smith. Martin and Elizabeth had no idea what awaited them. They had seven children, and out of those, four were blue. It was against all odds that, oceans away, Martin would find a bride who carried the same blue-blood recessive gene.

In 1913, the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs convinced a local coal baron, John C. Mayo, to subsidize a mounted library service to reach people in poor and remote areas. But a year later, the program expired when Mayo died. It would be almost twenty years until the service was revived.

The Pack Horse Library Project was established in 1935 and ran until 1943. The service was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) and an effort to create jobs for women and bring books and reading material into Appalachia, into the poorest and most isolated areas in eastern Kentucky that had few schools, no libraries, and inaccessible roads.

The librarians were known as “book women.” These fearsome Kentucky librarians traveled by horse, mule, and sometimes foot and even rowboat to reach the remotest areas, in creeks and up crags, into coves, disconnected pockets, and black forests, and to towns named Hell-fer-Sartin, Troublesome, and Cut Shin, sometimes traveling as much as one hundred or more miles a week in rain, sleet, or snow.

Pack Horse librarians were paid twenty-eight dollars a month and had to provide their own mounts. Books and reading materials and places for storing and sorting the material were all donated and not supplied by the WPA’s payroll. With few resources and little financial help, the Pack Horse librarians collected donated books and reading materials from the Boy Scouts, PTAs, women’s clubs, churches, and the state health department. The librarians came up with ingenious ways to provide more reading resources, such as making scrapbooks with collected recipes and housecleaning tips that the mountain people passed on to them in gratitude for their service. The book women colored pictures to make children’s picture books, journals, and more, all the while vigorously seeking donations.

Despite the financial obstacles, the harshness of the land, and the sometimes fierce mistrust of the people during the most violent era of eastern Kentucky’s history, the Pack Horse service was accepted and became dearly embraced. These clever librarians turned their traveling library program into a tremendous success. In the years of its service, more than one thousand women served in the Pack Horse Library Project, and it was reported that nearly 600,000 residents in thirty eastern Kentucky counties considered “pauper counties” were served by them. During those years, the beloved program left a powerful legacy and enriched countless lives.

”Excerpt: Kim Michele Richardson, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, Sourcebooks, Inc., 2019, 342-343

J.D. Vance

Venture capitalist, Author, and Commentator

“Early in my deployment, I attached to a civil affairs unit to do community outreach. Civil affairs missions were typically considered more dangerous, as a small number of marines would venture into unprotected Iraqi territory to meet with locals. On our particular mission, senior marines met with local school officials while the rest of us provided security or hung out with the schoolkids, playing soccer and passing out candy and school supplies. One very shy boy approached me and held out his hand. When I gave him a small eraser, his face briefly lit up with joy before he ran away to his family, holding his two-cent prize aloft in triumph. I have never seen such excitement on a child’s face.

I don’t believe in epiphanies. I don’t believe in transformative moments, as transformation is harder than a moment. I’ve seen far too many people awash in a genuine desire to change only to lose their mettle when they realized just how difficult change actually is. But that moment, with that boy, was pretty close for me. For my entire life, I’d harbored resentment at the world. I was mad at my mother and father, mad that I rode the bus to school while other kids caught rides with friends, mad that my clothes didn’t come from Abercrombie, mad that my grandfather died, mad that we lived in a small house. That resentment didn’t vanish in an instant, but as I stood and surveyed the mass of children of a war-torn nation, their school without running water, and the overjoyed boy, I began to appreciate how lucky I was: born in the greatest country on earth, every modern convenience at my fingertips, supported by two loving hillbillies, and part of a family that, for all its quirks, loved me unconditionally. At that moment, I resolved to be the type of man who would smile when someone gave him an eraser. I haven’t quite made it there, but without that day in Iraq, I wouldn’t be trying.”

Except from Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance: 172-173.

Bruce Springsteen

Singer, Songwriter, and Musician

“The Rising had its origins in the national telethon we were invited to be a part of the week after September 11. I wrote “Into the Fire” for that show (it remained incomplete, so I performed “My City of Ruins,” the song I’d written a year earlier for Asbury Park). Of the many tragic images of that day, the picture I couldn’t let go of was of the emergency workers going up the stairs as others rushed down to safety. The sense of duty, the courage, ascending into . . . what? The religious image of ascension, the crossing of the line between this world, the world of blood, work, family, your children, the breath in your lungs, the ground beneath your feet, all that is life, and . . . the next, flooded my imagination. If you love life or any part of it, the depth of their sacrifice is unthinkable and incomprehensible. Yet what they left behind was tangible. Death, along with all its anger, pain and loss, opens a window of possibility for the living. It removes the veil that the “ordinary” gently drapes over our eyes. Renewed sight is the hero’s last loving gift to those left behind.”

Excerpt from Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run: 886

Sue Monk Kidd

Novelist

“He laughed and asked about my family, about our life in Charleston. When I told him about the house on East Bay and the plantation in the upcountry, his lively expression died away. “You own slaves then?”

“. . . My family does, yes. But I, myself, don’t condone it.” “Yet you cast your lot with those who do?” I bristled. “. . . They are my family, sir. What would you have me do?” He gazed at me with kindness and pity. ‘To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil."

Excerpt from Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings: 382

Paul Johnson

Historian

“He collected and told jokes, too. He liked to sing. Beaverbrook said: “He did not sing in tune but he sang with energy and enthusiasm.” He liked to sing “Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay,” “Daisy, Daisy,” and old Boer War songs. His favorite was “Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers, which Lady Moran, who had a fine voice, would sing to him. He was emotional, and wept easily. But his tears soon dried, as joy came flooding back. He drew his strength from people, and imparted it to them in full measure. Everyone who values freedom under law, and government by, for, and from the people, can find comfort and reassurance in his life story.”

Excerpt from Paul Johnson, Churchill: 207