The Autobiography of an Execution is a searing memoir of what it is like to be a death penalty attorney.  It is a behind-the-scenes look at what it is really like to represent people on death row.  In Texas. While George W. Bush was governor.

Yeah, it doesn’t get much worse than that…well, except for the part about representing an innocent man and watching him be executed.  That’s definitely the worst.

It’s pretty heavy stuff.  Pretty heady stuff.  And this book would be a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad book if it weren’t for Katya and Lincoln, Dow’s wife and son who, in their real-world way lighten Dow’s load and make his life, and the story, so much better.

Dow shows the sausage making of capital punishment; the “tinkering with the machinery of death” that Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun denounced.  He displays the racism, the injustice, the absurdity of the byzantine system that exists in Texas.  It is all in the details of the cases described and in Dow’s commentary as he moves between them.

He does it with spare language, with no hyperbole and with an honesty that the rules of ethics limit but don’t preclude.  Having been there, done that, I can say without doubt that this book is True (with a capital T).  It is accurate.  It is real.  And it is sad beyond measure.

I almost didn’t read The Autobiography of an Execution because I knew that it would give me nightmares, would remind me of the dark days of the work that I used to do.  However I was glad that I did.  I found that it renewed my commitment to the abolition of capital punishment.  It also reminded me how a small spark of humanity sometimes comes from an unlikely source.  And it left me wishing that I was one of those few, brave souls who make it their life work to represent the unrepresentable, speak on behalf of the unspeakable, fight to preserve life — even of those who have taken life.

This book is about a 13 year old girl named Lakshmi who lives with her family in a small hut in the mountains of Nepal. Her family is REALLY poor, but her life is full of simple pleasures, like raising her black-and-white goat, and having her mother brush her hair. But when the harsh Himalayan monsoons wash away all that remains of the family’s crops, Lakshmi’s stepfather says she must leave home and take a job to support her family.

Her stepfather introduces her to a stranger who tells her she will find her a job as a maid working for a wealthy woman in the city. But when she gets to the city she ends up working for a horrible woman named Mumtaz. The place where Lakshmi works at is called “Happiness House” full of hope. But she soon learns the unthinkable truth: she has been sold into prostitution.

Lakshmi is forced to work there in till she can pay off her family’s debt. But Mumtaz cheats Lakshmi of her meager earnings so that she can never leave. To find out if Lakshmi ever leaves the “happiness house’’ you just have to read the book and find out.

Oh and I give it a 10/10.

The Kitchen House is a dual narrative that transports you to southern Virginia in the late 1700s; to a place where black slaves and white indentured servants live side by side, their work indistinguishable and yet the color of their skin separating them into worlds unfathomable from this distant view.

Lavinia is orphaned on the ship that brings her family to America.  She travels bound — not in physical chains like many slaves endured, but by the chain of indentured servitude.  Her Irish lilt and freckled nose distinguish her from the other kitchen and “big house” workers but her job as servant to the Captain (as the plantation owner is called) is no different.  She begins her story with little memory of what came before, so her history becomes rooted in the family of slaves that she works beside.

Belle is a slave, but her white father and adoring grandmother ensure that she learns to read and is “given her papers” – to ensure that she will be allowed to live free.  And yet, despite such advantages, the sorrows she endures limit her options.

The choices that Lavinia and Belle make – to stay, to leave, to return – are the core of the narrative, and yet their decisions are doled out like breadcrumbs along the footpath in the woods; we know they will lead to tragedy but Grissom keeps us guessing about how and where and when.

There is a deep sadness in this book, and because the characters are so deeply etched, it is palpable.  The everyday joys they celebrate and the decency –and depth — of their character makes The Kitchen House something more than just a sad commentary on a tragic history.  It brings the reality – the very harsh reality – of life on a Southern plantation an authenticity that is too often missing from white attempts to capture the experience of slaves.  I don’t – probably can’t – know how accurate this rendition of life on a pre-Civil War plantation is, but the story it tells has an authenticity that feels real.

The most amazing thing about this book is how believable each character is.  It is fairly easy to see how McCaulay could channel the voice of Sahara as she talks about life as a ‘browning’ who works in her best friend’s restaurant and struggles to raise her teenage boy on her own – although the book is not autobiography, there are parts of Sahara that match McCaulay’s life.  But McCaulay is just as effective getting inside the head of Dexter, the black ‘pickney’ boy – somebody who is different from her in pretty much every conceivable manner – race, gender, socio-economic status.  She makes his voice just as real, as believable, as she does for Sahara.

When Sahara decides to take on Dexter as a project – to see if she can make a difference in his life by providing him a scholarship to a private school — she quickly learns that she also needs to help his whole family:  his single mother (who is afraid to leave her shack and hasn’t worked in years) and his younger brother and sister, who all rely on his begging to provide the only cash they have for food and clothes and other necessities.  Dexter and his family live in a house with no electricity (except for what they steal from the neighbor by jerry-rigging a line so they can plug in one light and, of course, the television set.)

As Sahara gets more and more entwined in the lives of Dexter and his family, she realizes that her own son is pulling away from her – through a newly found desire to connect to his father, and then through his decision to attend college in America.  She doesn’t ever pretend that Dexter can fill the void that her own son will be leaving, but she does find some solace in being able to do something in the face of such deprivation that so many people in Jamaica endure.

Dexter is not just a two dimensional “poor boy from the ghetto.”  He is a complex character who worries about his younger brother being beat up by the bullies when he goes to get water, and he protects a young girl from being gang raped in his school bathroom – and also does drugs, steals and hangs out with street kids who lead him the wrong way. The decent-ness within is what makes Dexter such a compelling character –even when he makes bad choices that lead to the non-Hollywood ending.

I loved this book.  Although the story is seeped in Jamaica, it is a universal tale of rich and poor, of justice and injustice, of the structural violence of poverty – and, most importantly, one of hope that human connections can transcend the gaps, if one only makes the time and the effort to do so.

In The Routes of Man, Conover explores in depth six roads around the world which, through location, timing or culture, have a significant impact on the people who live nearby.  He goes to the jungles of Peru in search of mahogany and explores how the lives of those who depend on its harvest could be changed if the long proposed (and never quite planned) road from forest to sea is built.  He goes to Zanskar, an enclave hidden high in eastern India where the only road out during the winter is a frozen river that is safe for travel just a few weeks each year.  And then Conover returns to Kenya to retrace the route that came to be known as the “AIDS highway.”

In Israel and Palestine, Conover explores “a war you can commute to” and the roads that take you there.  He describes the humiliation that Palestinians absorb daily as they commute, and then explores the impact on the Israelis who serve along those roads anticipating the violence that too often shatters the landscape.

The landscape of China and the boom of its auto industry are stunning – and Conover’s description of his time spent immersed in the nascent “car club” culture of modern China describe a future that is both unsustainable and inevitable.

In the final chapter, Conover returns to Africa, to Lagos, Nigeria, where he spends his days speeding (at least trying to speed through traffic choked roads) from freeway accident to hospital in an ambulance staffed by nurses and a driver who teach him about the human toll that our obsession with roads impose.

Throughout the chapters, Conover intersperse personal vignettes, ancient and modern history, and economic theory.  He gives sufficient depth to his stories so that they are not mere travelogues, but more like a dip into the cool waters of another culture – surprising, refreshing, and a tad bit uncomfortable. He gives you just enough depth that you begin to understand – but leaves you with important questions so you want to go back for more.

(first published in Etude: New Voices in Literary Nonfiction)

Amazingly, it works.

Deogratias grew up in Burundi, a small, landlocked, densely populated country in central east Africa whose past and future are inextricably tied – through cultural overlap and the horrors of genocide — with its neighbor to the north, Rwanda.

Deo grew up in a close-knit family of cattle herders who worked hard to ensure that he was able to go to school. He was a star pupil studying medicine when, in the winter of 1993-94, his education was brutally interrupted by the senseless ethnic violence that preceded the genocide.

When the violence began, Deo escaped – ironically – to Rwanda, just as that country itself spiraled into genocide. Although many are familiar with Rwanda in April 1994 (depicted in the movie Hotel Rwanda) the genocide in Burundi began before and lasted long after the horrors in Rwanda had ceased.

As a member of the Tutsi ethnic group, Deo lived in constant fear that he would be found out, and murdered because of his heritage. He witnessed atrocities in Rwanda, where the Hutu majority relentlessly killed their Tutsi neighbors. He fled back to Burundi after months spent walking at night and hiding during the daytime — stealing food, drinking fouled water, and yet somehow surviving.

Through the miracle of a friend with connections, Deo flew to America and ended up living in New York City, Central Park to be precise. As a homeless person delivering groceries to the wealthy, he grapples with the harsh reality of his new life, frustrated by the indignities that he endures when people treat him as stupid merely because he does not speak fluent English.

Then he meets Sharon McKenna, an ex-nun who first helps him find medical care and then connects him with her friends Nancy and Charlie — who become both benefactor and family to Deo.  Through them, he is able to return to school and finish his undergraduate education (at Columbia no less) with the dream of someday returning to medical school.

Through school, he met Paul Farmer, a physician and medical anthropologist who was featured in Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains. Through Farmer, the journey to Strength in What Remains began.

The brilliance of this book is that Kidder melds the narrative of genocide with  Deo’s Horatio Alger story. And in structuring the book as he did, Kidder also gives us insight into how a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer gathers the details of a story. Kidder never forgets that the book is about Deo and his story, but through the intimacy of his first-person narrative, he exposes, to an appropriately lesser degree, his story as well.

Novogratz began her career as an international banker and was in Rwanda to “help the African people” — but she soon learned that they didn’t want, or need, the kind of help she was there to provide.  And so began her real education, a journey among the poor, an exploration of how capital and power are unevenly distributed, an exploration of how and why traditional aid so often fails.

The Blue Sweater is a narrative, a memoir, a beautifully crafted polemic on how those with power and capital and control of the markets create wealth, and how the power of capital and markets can be used to improve the lives of the poor.  Novogratz may have started out as a starry eyed American blind to the privileges conveyed by the accident of her birth, but she quickly learned that if she wanted to ‘change the world’ she needed to better understand the needs and desires of the people she hoped to help.

Novogratz makes plenty of mistakes, and takes some side trips along the way, but this story of her journey from young idealist to wizened professional is compelling, poetic, and true.  She divulges just enough detail of her life to keep you interested, and explores and explains what she has learned with the right amount of detail so that you better understand why she makes the decisions about her future that she does.  Eventually the lessons she learned in pre-genocide Rwanda and at Stanford Business School collide into the creation of the Acumen Fund — a brilliant mix of ” philanthropic capital and business acumen” working to “solve the problems of global poverty.”

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World is more than a memoir, it is a call to action.  It is also an excellent history of life in Rwanda before the genocide — and a hopeful description of how Rwanda has moved through and beyond that dark slice of its past to a future that is not simply hopeful, but seeded with sparks of brilliance.

I probably could quote from memory may more lines of this book — I read it so many times to each of my nephews, to my niece, to my daughters….and had it read to me at least three dozen times by Casey, the little red headed boy I worked with through the SMART program — he loved, loved, loved this book.  And I loved hearing the delight in his voice as he read it again and again until he practically could recite it without looking at the text.

I now have a nephew named Sam and I am sure that someday we will make for him green eggs and ham . . . and I hope he has the same delight in his eyes eating them as we will have in making them … and I hope that he too loves the book and the message of trying new things — and the value of persistence (how many times can you urge someone to try something (like eating green eggs and ham)  before they finally capitulate and do what you asked — and like it too!)

Phew, November is over and I posted a review a day!  I probably won’t keep up that same pace but it has been fun to do and I’ll keep at it….and will be linking all the books to my Powell’s partner page — so if you’re inclined to purchase the book, just click through and buy it at Powell’s — I’ll earn a small commission on each sale (at no cost to you) and I’ll donate all the proceeds to support charities in Ethiopia that support kids and education.

The book is part academic analysis and part storytelling with a purpose — just enough of the academic analysis to push you to stretch your brain cells to understand, but (luckily!) enough storytelling to keep you interested and willing to look up words you don’t know and thinking about ideas that you’ve never thought about before and finish the book.

Farmer takes you to villages on the high plateau of Haiti and prisons in northern Russia and clinics in Boston — all with his perspective of believing that the Bible and all human morals dictate a ‘preferential option for the poor.’  Farmer lives that preferential option and shows that even mere mortals can make choices that promote treating all people as truly equal.  Through the organization he started, Partners in Health, Farmer does just that.