Peachy Reads

Roy Jr. is a first gen college graduate of Morehouse and has high hopes for the future as a newlywed and in an entry level position with a textbook company.   All that rosy vision of the future is shattered when he is falsely imprisoned after being accused of a rape.   The status of his marriage during the five years of his incarceration is told via letters, and in the voices of those involved.   The characters are all very multi-faceted and speak in a way that is extremely believable.  And I liked the way the story resolved itself, it seemed very true to life. This Oprah Book Club pick has been at the top of the popularity lists for months and garnered its fair share of awards.   Another interesting angle for the Atlanta reader is that Tayari Jones is a local and An American Marriage takes place largely in Atlanta.

Toby, a PR person for a Dublin art gallery, leads a charmed life.   When two burglars break into his apartment and beat him up severely, his life is shattered.   Later, he moves into the ancestral home to take care of an ailing uncle suffering from terminal brain cancer.   When a skeleton is discovered in the back garden, Toby’s fragile mental state makes it difficult to process the facts of the case, and his potential role in a history.   This psychological thriller depends on an unreliable narrator and keeps the reader guessing until nearly the end.

Dave Eggers has chronicled the story of the most recent wave of immigrants to the US with Zeitoun , What is the What? , and now The Monk of Mokha .   In this latest nonfiction account, he follows Yemeni-American Mohktar Alkanshali as he develops from a shiftless youth to successful coffee mogul.   He decides (in a somewhat haphazard way) to promote the heritage of coffee in his ancestral land, and elevate the Yemeni coffee industry (and improve the lot of coffee farmers) to an esteemed place internationally.   All this is difficult to achieve in a war-torn country that long ago all but forgot its pride of place in introducing coffee to the world centuries earlier.

Just Mercy is basically about a messed-up justice system that puts people on death row without due process, with these individuals frequently proven to be innocent years after their initial incarceration.   The author of this nonfiction work focuses mainly on the case of Walter McMillian, an African-American  wrongfully put on death row for the 1986 murder of a white woman in Alabama.  The book covers a lot of other cases of injustice, and it really is a compelling read, and a shocking eye-opener to see the frequent miscarriage of justice continuing on into our day.  The author makes a convincing argument linking the treatment of prisoners today to the treatment of blacks under Jim Crow laws. Movie advert Bryan Stevenson is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI).   I first became aware of EJI after visiting the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice (the lynching memorial) in Montgomery, AL, on a recent trip.  My daughter encouraged me to read thi