Customer Comments

The truly amazing thing about this book is that these stories are real and are happening today and not in some fictional past. Get ready for your view of our world to be blown open and for your heart to be pierced by what you discover. Until what has been so hidden is revealed, we have no hope to heal our country. African American and Latino communities, both children and adults, have been so long abused by the pernicious systems of racism that are welded into the foundations of criminal justice that most white Americans take the current state of racial inequity to be both normal and appropriate. And those of us who have had the privilege to remain unaware and unaffected are silent co-conspirators in sustaining this arrangement of abuse. Thank you, Bryan Stevenson, teacher and warrior for the vulnerable, for raising up a bright lamp on the road toward racial justice.

With powerful storytelling and unrelenting honesty, Gwartney tells the story of her battle to bring her runaway daughters home and out of harm's way. She doesn't make herself the hero of her narrative but has written a compelling book that stayed with me long after the ending.