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‘Once Upon A Time’ By Marina Warner

Charles Euchner, The Boston Globe

In this lively, scholarly work, Warner surveys centuries of fairy tales and academic research about them. She ties these tales to virtually every aspect of culture — mythology, art, music, movies, games, and psychology. We need them, she says, to make sense of the world.

The Year In Poems

Elisabeth Denison, New Yorker

Review: Book On Dying, Useful To The End

Terri Schlichenmeyer, Times Record

For about the last century, the average lifespan for North Americans has increased. Modern medicine taught doctors how to save lives but, until relatively recently, it didn’t teach them how to deal with life’s end.

A Kansas Town Rallies For A Modest Lifeline: A Local Grocery Store

Mitch Smith, New York Times

Here in southwest Kansas, where small communities have struggled since the Dust Bowl to retain businesses and residents, a town’s viability is measured by what has not yet closed. Losing a post office is considered the kiss of death. Losing a school can be a terminal diagnosis.

But losing a grocery store, as Plains did in 2001, is a problem that, while not necessarily lethal, is most certainly cause for concern.

Disney CEO Bob Iger's Empire Of Tech

Michal Lev-Ram, Fortune

Bob Iger has spent much of his near decade at Disney wearing an additional corporate hat: CTO. The result? He has brought the coolest innovations from Lucasfilm, Pixar, Marvel, and ESPN into a single galaxy.

Leviathan

David Sedaris, New Yorker

Ways to have fun at the beach.

Poem Of The Week: Signal Flags (Without You It’s Chaos) By Lucy Tunstall

Carol Rumens, The Guardian

The Town With Three Christmas Days

Yolande Knell, BBC

Christmas comes but once a year - unless you live in Bethlehem, where three different Christian denominations celebrate on three different days.

Why Airlines Want To Make You Suffer

Tim Wu, New Yorker

The conditions of carriage may lack the importance of other, more pressing social issues. But when an airline like JetBlue is punished for merely trying to treat all of its passengers decently, something isn’t right.

My Daughter, The User

Paul Ford, Medium

What my toddler told me about making websites.

"That Joke Has Everything": David Letterman, Before Late Night

Peter Kaplan, The Stacks

The comedian who can make it on television is the one who can preside over the talk show landscape. He's the comedian who can keep things going and react to the traffic of guests sitting down on and leaving a couch; he's the comedian who represents security and durability to a network. Who knows, who even cares anymore, whether Johnny Carson is actually funny? We know that we like to laugh with him, but who knows whether he actually pushes the catch lever that leads to the joy-pain spasm? He is, more than anything, a triumphant and reassuring habit; he can react and act with the flow of the society, and because of that he's worth more than any eight sitcoms.

The Last Book I Loved: Pen & Ink

Kelly J. Baker, The Rumpus

I’m reminded that we all struggle with our stories and sometimes we need more than words to tell them. Tattoo by tattoo, the contributors share their stories and so much more.

‘Die Again’ By Tess Gerritsen

Daneet Steffens, The Boston Globe

“Die Again’’ is smart and tightly strung, densely action-packed and full of canny, unsettling observations — like Rizzoli realizing over a dinner-table steak that, “Whether it comes from a cow or human, we are all fresh meat” — as well as a fascinating theory of a possible evolutionary connection between early man and leopards.

‘How We Got To Now,’ By Steven Johnson

Jon Gertner, New York Times

Have you ever wondered why flash photography led to antipoverty programs at the turn of the 20th century? Or how the invention of the laser contributed to the decline of mom-and-pop stores? Of course you haven’t, because you didn’t really stop to think — wait, check that; I didn’t really stop to think — how the invention of flash photography finally allowed Jacob Riis to capture the images of dismal tenement life on New York’s Lower East Side that he had already been writing about, with little impact, for years. Or how the laser begat the bar code that, in turn, gave an efficiency advantage to stores like Target and Walmart. “How We Got to Now” is full of nifty connections like these — stories that illustrate obscure chains of causality that shaped the modern world.

‘The Lives Of Others,’ By Neel Mukherjee

Hirsh Sawhney, New York Times

“The Lives of Others” is a sophisticated meditation on suffering that invites empathy for characters who embrace violent ideologies as a result of injustice without ever vindicating the horrific violence they commit. Likewise, it demonstrates how oppressive socio-economic structures brutalize people while showing that brutality can sometimes be random, and its causes ultimately elusive.

Book Review: ‘The Iris Fan,’ A Thriller By Laura Joh Rowland

Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post

In addition to intricate plotting, Rowland’s consistent strength throughout her series has been the authority she brings to her portraits of her idiosyncratic characters and their world.

Did You Hear The One About North Korea?

Craig Silverman, Digg

This Christmas, while many of us enjoy time with our families and exchange gifts, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will sit at the head of a long, exquisite table, eating his way through plates of Emmentaler and guzzling cobra wine. Or maybe he'll be pondering which relative he should feed to a pack of starving, bloodthirsty hounds.

Actually, we have no idea what Jong-un's holiday will look like.

Mansplanation Nation

Heather Havrilesky, Bookforum

How two decades of nonfiction best sellers teem with fake self-assurance—and testosterone.

Christmas Day Is Supposed To Be Dull. Enjoy The Novelty Of Utter Boredom

Emma Brockes, The Guardian

The entire point of Christmas is that it’s supposed to be boring; you get an hour of excitement first thing and then the day devolves into an endless cycle of cooking, small talk, snoring relatives, over-heated rooms with no escape and – in England, at least – the Queen’s Speech, an annual lowlight that reminds you of the virtue of every other day of the calendar year when you are not made privy to Her Majesty’s thoughts.

The Dark Side Of The Moon

Jeanne Marie Laskas, GQ

He was a war-hero fighter pilot. He was an MIT rocket scientist. He was a lot of impressive things, and then Buzz Aldrin went to the moon, which is maybe all you know about one of the most famous men on earth—a guy who's been frozen, like a footprint in lunar dust, in America's mind for forty-five years now. But the thing about Buzz is that he still wants way more than the moon.

Inside Café Edison's Final Day; Broadway Bids Farewell Over Matzo And Memories

Jena Tesse Fox, Playbill

From chorus kids to Broadway stars, New Yorkers to tourists, the no-frills diner known for its characteristically brusque New York service and Jewish comfort food was the culinary crossroads of the theatrical world.

The True Meaning Of Christmas (That Everyone Forgets)

David Wong, Cracked

Let's say we find out an asteroid is going to hit the earth at some point over the next three months. It may kill all of us, it may kill some of us, it may splash harmlessly into the ocean -- but there is no stopping it. All we can do is hunker down and see what happens. How would you react? How would humanity as a whole react? Well, I know how: we would prepare as best we could, and then we would surround ourselves with the people we love most and party our asses off. We would do it, because we would realize it might be our last chance. I know this, because we have Christmas.

‘Skylight’ By José Saramago

Nick Romeo, The Boston Globe

“Skylight’’ is a fascinating and startlingly mature work, one that would merit publication even if its author had never written another book. The many hints of the styles and themes of his later novels add interest, but the book is a gem in its own right.

‘Butterflies In November’ By Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

Clea Simon, The Boston Globe

On an island, there’s only so far you can go before you find yourself back where you started. That’s one of the themes circulating through Icelandic author Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s quirky and enchanting novel, “Butterflies in November.”

What 800 Nerds On A Cruise Ship Taught Me About Life, The Universe, And Snorkeling

Adam Rogers, Wired

Jonathan Coulton loves cruise ships. He loves the weird artificial mall running down the middle, and he loves staring off the back of the ship into infinity. That’s not to say that David Foster Wallace’s famously dark assessment of shipboard vacationing (“There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad”) is unfamiliar. The lanyard that holds a laser-cut wooden JoCo Cruise name tag around my neck came printed with the phrase “A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again.” Inside jokes are the coin of the realm around here.

We’re sitting in the courtyard of a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, hotel; our ship departs tomorrow morning. Around us, other cruise-bound performers are gathering—Grant Imahara of MythBusters is introducing himself to NPR host Peter Sagal. The comedian Paul F. Tompkins is filling a plate with nachos at the buffet. This trip, Coulton says, he might break his rule not to go Jet Skiing, but he’s not sure what he’ll do with his glasses.

The Race To Save Peter Kassig

Shiv Malik, Ali Younes, Spencer Ackerman and Mustafa Khalili, The Guardian

The American aid worker was killed by his Isis captors on 16 November. Here, for the first time, is the story of an extraordinary effort to secure his release, which involved a radical New York lawyer, the US government, and the world’s most revered jihadi scholar.

How Did Roasting Vegetables Become A Thing?

J. Bryan Lowder, Slate

Boiling used to be the default vegetable cooking method. We attempt to trace the shift from stovetop to oven.

Mystery In A Mormon Community

Janet Maslin, New York Times

In her closing acknowledgments, Ms. Harrison addresses the Mormon community in which she lives, saying she hopes she has done justice to the complexity of its doctrine and culture. “As Linda says, this is my Mormonism,” she writes. It is her hope that any readers will see “how smart, thoughtful, kind and powerful Mormon women can be, even if they seem to be following a traditionally feminine path.”

Mathematicians Make A Major Discovery About Prime Numbers

Erica Klarreich, Wired

“It’s a very obvious question, one of the first you might ever ask about primes,” said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the University of Montreal. “But the answer has been more or less stuck for almost 80 years.”

Is String Theory About To Unravel?

Brian Greene, Smithsonian Magazine

Evidence that the universe is made of strings has been elusive for 30 years, but the theory's mathematical insights continue to have an alluring pull.

In Focus: A Cuban Food And Love Story

Ellen Silverman, Medium

Often taking a picture led to a conversation, which added a richness and depth to my images. I have traveled the country from east to west, mesmerized by the color, texture, and rhythm of everything that I saw.

‘Alphabetabum,’ ‘Take Away The A’ And More

Patricia Crain, New York Times

A good alphabet book is like a raucous playroom for language, persuading children to internalize the ABCs by turning the letters into toys. Rhymes and rhythm, metaphor and simile, alliteration, assonance and consonance — the ABC book’s verbal gymnastics match the alphabet’s inherently visual nature, making the genre not just a feast for young readers but a rewarding medium for illustrators and designers too.

Los Angeles, As A Pedestrian

Stephanie Rosenbloom, New York Times

But just when you think walking these interminable avenues is for East Coast chumps, something makes you smile.

Evan Thompson’s ‘Waking, Dreaming, Being’

Adam Frank, New York Times

More than evolution, more than inexhaustible arguments over God’s existence, the real fault line between science and religion runs through the nature of consciousness. Carefully unpacking that contentious question, and exploring what Buddhism offers its investigation, is the subject of Evan Thompson’s new book, “Waking, Dreaming, Being.”

The Foreign Spell

Pico Iyer, Lapham's Quarterly

To be a foreigner is to be perpetually detached, but it is also to be continually surprised.

This “Minecraft” Community Is Saving The Lives Of Children With Autism

Charlie Warzel, BuzzFeed

Autcraft is one of hundreds of thousands of active Minecraft servers, but one of only a few that caters exclusively to children, young adults, and parents of children with autism and Asperger’s. Painstakingly moderated by a team of dutiful (and intensely vetted) volunteers, Autcraft is a safe haven to 5,000 players from all over the world and arguably one of the best communities on the internet.

Giving Stephen Hawking A Voice

Joao Medeiros, Wired UK

"The more we observed him and listened to his concerns, the more it dawned on us that what he was really asking, in addition to improving how fast he could communicate, was for new features that would let him interact better with his computer," says Nachman.

In Layered Fiction And Wry Notes To Mom, A Cosmic Genius Distilled

Janet Maslin, New York Times

The time is right for “The David Foster Wallace Reader,” an anthology meant to serve different purposes for different readers.

How To Hide Past iTunes Purchases

J.D. Biersdorfer, New York Times

How Headlines Change The Way We Think

Maria Konnikova, New Yorker

By now, everyone knows that a headline determines how many people will read a piece, particularly in this era of social media. But, more interesting, a headline changes the way people read an article and the way they remember it. The headline frames the rest of the experience. A headline can tell you what kind of article you’re about to read—news, opinion, research, LOLcats—and it sets the tone for what follows.

What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried To Be Steve Jobs

Nicholas Carlson, New York Times

She believed it could again become a top-tier tech firm that enjoyed enormous growth and competed for top talent. And two years in, Mayer, who has a tendency to compare herself with Steve Jobs, wasn’t about to abandon her turnaround plan.

Book Review: ‘The Strange Library,’ By Haruki Murakami

Joseph Peschel, Washington Post

Murakami does lapse into bouts of over-playfulness, but whether he is writing for adults or children, he remains a suspenseful and fantastical storyteller.

Why James Cameron’s Aliens Is The Best Movie About Technology

Tim Carmody, Medium

Our humanity is capacious enough to extend to other beings (including those we have made with our own hands). We also have perspective enough to nuke the things we’ve made from orbit when it’s necessary to save lives. We are craven beings, but that’s not all we are. Even an orphan, a marine, an android, and a badass warrant officer turned surrogate mom can become a kind of family.

Things That Make The Librarian Angry

Jessamyn West, Medium

Enforcing artificial scarcity is a bad role for a public institution.

Ghosts Of Fast Food Past

Sarah Baird, Medium

The awkward second life of restaurant chain buildings.

Poem Of The Week: Bodies By Miriam Gamble

Carol Rumen's, The Guardian

How The Smile Came To Paris (Briefly)

Mary Beard, The Spectator

In 1787 critics of the Paris Salon were scandalised by a painting exhibited by Mme Vigée Le Brun. The subject was conventional enough: a self-portrait of the artist cradling her small daughter. The problem was that Vigée Le Brun was depicted smiling. You could even see her teeth. This was, as one critic put it, ‘an affectation which artists, connoisseurs and people of good taste are unanimous in condemning’.

Book Review: ‘Irene’ By Pierre Lemaitre

Patrick Anderson, Washington Post

In “Irene,” violence ups the ante, and tough-minded writing carries the day.

Book Review: ‘China 1945,” Mao And America, By Richard Bernstein

John Pomfret, Washington Post

It’s natural that this new sobriety should affect not simply how China is viewed today but also how its past is depicted. The best history is not written in an ivory tower, after all; it’s done with an eye on today. And that brings us to Richard Bernstein’s excellent “China 1945.”

In Defense Of ‘Women’s Pages’

Judith Martin, Washington Post

Who could ever have been so blind and bigoted as to believe that only women attended parties, had children, wore clothes, lived in homes and ate food?

Certainly not those of us who worked there. We lived with that section head because the women’s department was where the jobs were — we could see how few women were advancing elsewhere in the news business — and because it was an exciting place to work.

‘Essays After Eighty’ By Donald Hall

William H. Pritchard, The Boston Globe

He concludes the list by noting that “One day, of course, no one will remember what I remember.” A fine book of remembering all sorts of things past, “Essays After Eighty” is to be treasured.

As Good As New

Charlie Jane Anders, Tor.com

Radio Raheem Is A Broken Record: Lessons From Do The Right Thing On Its 25Th Anniversary

Lee Weston Sabo, Bright Lights Film Journal

Do the Right Thing wasn’t ahead of its time. It was behind its time, and it’s ahead of ours.

‘Who We Be,’ By Jeff Chang

Tricia Rose, New York Times

The dramatic changes spurred by the civil rights ­movement and other 1960s social upheavals are often chronicled as a time line of catalytic legal victories that ended anti-black segregation. Jeff Chang’s “Who We Be: The Colorization of America” claims that cultural changes were equally important in transforming American society, and that both the legal and cultural forms of desegregation faced a sustained hostile response that continues today.

Http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/books/review/j-by-howard-jacobson.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Matthew Specktor, New York Times

So much of its complexity, pleasure and occasional difficulty stems from its sequence of omissions and its non-chronological presentation.

“We All Feel Sad, Big Bird”: When Sesame Street Confronted Death

Molly Eichel, The A.V. Club

As it mourned Mr. Hooper, the show found strength in honesty.

Inside The Collapse Of The New Republic

Ryan Lizza, New Yorker

Hughes addressed the group by speakerphone. “How are we going to produce the issue?” he asked.

The Case Of The Missing Nude

Bruce Buschel, Medium

“It was there and then it wasn’t there. Like a mandala. Sort of perfect.”

“But there was no plan for this to blow away,” I said.

“Of course there was,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“It was chalk on a chalkboard, dad.”

“So?”

“How obvious does impermanence have to be?”

“Then why am I crying?”

“Because you’re an idiot.”

Marginalia’s Moment: Philip Roth, Don DeLillo And The Joys Of Writing In Books

Laura Miller, Salon

It's time to stop fetishizing books as sacred objects and start happily defacing them.

Do You Know What Happens At The End Of The Goldfinch?

Charlotte Runcie, The Telegraph

Authors themselves may be horrified to learn that the heartbreaking denouement they slaved over for months has been skipped by their readers. But they have to earn the right to our sustained attention, and we’re perfectly entitled to disagree with them about when to cut and run. Sometimes the result is better all around.

Future Perfect

Iwan Rhys Morus, Aeon

Social progress, high-speed transport and electricity everywhere – how the Victorians invented the future.

The Tiger Who Flew Halfway Across The World For A Better Life

Andrew Bomford, BBC

He weighs 260kg, has a bone-crushing bite and paws the size of dinner plates, but Phevos the tiger is the latest victim of Greece's economic crisis - and this week he left the country for a new home on other side of the world.

The New York Times’ Obscene Profanity Policy

Justin Peters, Slate

What’s more important to the paper of record, reporting the news or protecting its readers’ delicate sensibilities?

The City That Is Moving Down The Road

Feargus O'Sullivan, Next City

This city of 23,000 was founded for one reason only: to mine an apparently bottomless seam of iron ore located in Sweden’s northern wilds. This resource made the town prosperous, but it also sounded the death knell of Kiruna as its citizens now know it. If extraction is to continue, the mine must burrow to a depth of 1.3 kilometers, so far beneath the earth on which Kiruna stands that the town’s very foundations are at risk. Kirunans faced a stark choice: Give up on the mine or move the city.

The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History By Boris Johnson – Review

Ian Jack, The Guardian

Why is Boris Johnson publishing a breezy book about Churchill? The answer depends on your view of his political calculation.

From A Slim Book, Many Observations

Dwight Garner, New York Times

This is a poet who can’t abide pretension. Reading her poems reminded me of an observation I’ve always prized, though I can’t recall (nor can I find out on Google) who wrote it: “Tell those potatoes to take off their parsley, we know them.”

The Magician's Land By Lev Grossman Review

Edward Austin Hall, Paste

The ways he remakes themes familiar from such 20th-century classics as “The Library of Babel” leaves me with one ineluctable truth: Lev Grossman is our Borges.

‘All My Puny Sorrows’ By Miriam Toews

Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe

“All My Puny Sorrows” is about many things, including the right to die and the ruinous legacy of suicide. But it is ultimately about learning the very tricky art of survival: how to go on, arm in arm, leaning hard on each other to struggle through.

All Beans, No Tomatoes

Rachel Pieh Jones, The Smart Set

A week in the life of a food vendor in Djibouti.

Why Poor People Stay Poor

Linda Tirado, Slate

Because our lives seem so unstable, poor people are often seen as being basically incompetent at managing their lives. That is, it’s assumed that we’re not unstable because we’re poor, we’re poor because we’re unstable. So let’s just talk about how impossible it is to keep your life from spiraling out of control when you have no financial cushion whatsoever. And let’s also talk about the ways in which money advice is geared only toward people who actually have money in the first place.

Starbucks Wants To Be The Next Fancy Hipster Coffee Shop. And That Could Be A Good Thing

Chérmelle Edwards, The Guardian

But the question for independents, and those who love them, is whether the big chain can spur more of the coffee-drinking public to consider buying not just a different cup of coffee ... but a great cup off coffee.

Minimum_maximum

Hirato Renkichi, Asymptote

British Humour

Ian C. Smith, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore

The Boy Who Grew Up

Christopher Barzak, Uncanny Magazine

Changes Without Notice

Angelina Adams, Smart Pop Books

By reading one book, my life had taken a direction and been filled with people I never could have imagined. Those offhand words weren’t just a clever disregard for the effect time has on a physical appearance; “the rest changes without notice” was life. Without my noticing what was happening, Anne managed to reach out and make profound changes in my life.

Playful And Serious? 'How To Be' Is Both

Heller McAlpin, NPR

Can a book be both linguistically playful and dead serious? Structurally innovative and reader-friendly? Mournful and joyful? Brainy and moving? Ali Smith's How To Be Both, which recently won the prestigious, all-Brit two-year-old Goldsmiths prize for being a truly novel novel, is all of the above — and then some.

‘Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story,’ By Rick Bragg

Stephen King, New York Times

When the performance was over, after less than two minutes of high-­tension rock ’n’ roll, she said softly, wonderingly, “I think that young man is crazy.” Then she added, almost to herself, “But he can play the piano like the Devil lit his behind on fire.”

Yes. Just like that. And although Rick Bragg belabors the point, it makes this overlong biography worth reading.

The View From A Bridge

Adam Gopnik, New Yorker

Shopping, tourism, and the changing face of luxury.

The Golden Quarter

Michael Hanlon, Aeon

Some of our greatest cultural and technological achievements took place between 1945 and 1971. Why has progress stalled?

Classic Poems, Updated For The Internet Age

Jazmine Hughes, The Hairpin

A trail of weather emojis, dancing in the snow.

What Happened To All The Music Blogs? Wild Honey Pie Embraces A New Model

Chris Chafin, Brooklyn Magazine

“The secret is, nobody knows what they’re doing online,” says Maura Johnston, one of the founding editors of music blog Idolator, and, later, the music editor of The Village Voice. This is especially clear in music blogging, where lone people working in their spare time built thriving sites with loyal followings, only to have them destroyed by well-organized companies supposedly skilled in business.

The Greenroom Revolution

Marielle Wakim, Los Angeles Magazine

Conan O’Brien’s boasts a PS2, which guests can play while sitting in Zero Gravity massage chairs from Brookstone. Fallon is known to have his stocked with freshly baked cookies from the acclaimed New York bakery Momofuku Milk Bar. Seth Meyers’s has a perfectly positioned photo booth for celebrity selfies (Anna Kendrick! Nick Cannon!). The Late Show with David Letterman even offers personalized creature comforts.

Book Review: ‘How To Be Both,’ By Ali Smith

Ron Charles, Washington Post

Ali Smith’s playfully brilliant new novel makes me both excited and wary of recommending it. This gender-blending, genre-blurring story, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, bounces across centuries, tossing off profound reflections on art and grief, without getting tangled in its own postmodern wires. It’s the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don’t seem entirely possible — How did she get here from there? — but you’ve got to be willing to hang on.

An Answer To The Novel’s Detractors

Adelle Waldman, New Yorker

Before we rush to condemn the novel’s supposedly obsolete conventions, we ought to look at what they do well.

Credit Roll

Tina Chase Gillmor, Medium

I’m just a person who weirdly pays attention to this stuff. I know only what I’ve come to glean over the years of watching credits roll by and perusing a few legal documents on the Internet. I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not in the movie business. I’m sure you all will sort this out and set me straight. In fact, I’m counting on it so I can sleep soundly again knowing the next time I read movie credits everything will be normal again. But this one — this one is bothering me.

‘Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free’ By Cory Doctorow

James Sullivan, The Boston Globe

In “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free,” the science-fiction author and Internet advocate lays out a convincing case on behalf of the net benefits of a free and open digital culture.

Why Our Memory Fails Us

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, New York Times

When we recall our own memories, we are not extracting a perfect record of our experiences and playing it back verbatim. Most people believe that memory works this way, but it doesn’t. Instead, we are effectively whispering a message from our past to our present, reconstructing it on the fly each time.

How Restaurants Cut Corners: Embalmed Shrimp And Headless Beer

Olga Oksman, The Guardian

Running a successful restaurant isn’t even about nickels and dimes; it is all about the pennies.

‘See You In Paradise’ By J. Robert Lennon

Clea Simon, Boston Globe

Life is weird. If J. Robert Lennon has one point to make in this fresh and funny collection of 14 short stories, it is this: People are strange and unpredictable, and no matter what the universe throws at them — and in his stories, there are a considerable number of curveballs — nothing comes close to the oddities we ourselves conjure up.

The Disgrace Of Our Criminal Justice

David Cole, The New York Review Of Books

Just Mercy is every bit as moving as To Kill a Mockingbird, and in some ways more so. Although it reads like a novel, it’s a true story and, in that sense, is infinitely more troubling. It’s set not in the distant Jim Crow South, a time when we now acknowledge these kinds of injustices were legion, but in the new South, which claims to have moved on. And while Stevenson’s account is not as naive as Scout’s, he brings to its telling a faith in the human spirit that, like Scout’s narrative, casts in sharp relief the cruel injustices they relate.