Bryan Stevenson is a public interest lawyer who has dedicated his entire career to the pursuit of justice through his dedication to the poor, the incarcerated (with a specific interest in the juveniles who are incarcerated), and those that are condemned to life in prison and death row. Through this dedication, he was led to the creation of the equal justice initiative (EJI), where he works as the executive director, establishing his headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama. All of this is chronicled in his book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, where he details not only the realities of being an African American male interested in law in America…

Ryan Holiday is the author of the bestselling Ego Is the Enemy, and Conspiracy and roots the majority of his self-help books in stoicism a school of Hellenistic philosophy heavily influenced by Socrates; however, much of what he writes is influenced by Marcus Aurelius (Meditations), a Roman emperor who reigned from 161 to 180 AD. Aside from compiling his own memoir-like writings, He also serves as the launching pad for most people’s dive into the stoic realm and Ryan creates a contemporary landscape for some of his more poignant points to live in today’s empire.  Stoicism deals heavily with an analysis of one’s own judgement of self and others in a universal perspective. This…

“‘Black America’ doesn’t live here anymore” – Eugene Robinson As the front cover of the book suggests, most African Americans feel like there was a time when there were agreed-upon “black leaders,” when there was a clear “black agenda,” when we could talk confidently about the “state of black America” – but not anymore. Disintegration: the splintering of black America is Eugene Robinson’s response to that gnawing feeling that we all feel at the backs of our necks: maybe things are different? And maybe we aren’t all occupying the same space as we once were? Eugene Robinson is an American Columnist with the Washington Post, and even before that, he was…

The memory is a living thing – it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives – the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead. ~ Eudora Welty In this epigraph from Eudora Welty, Jesmyn Ward attempts to encapsulate the omnipresent specter that time places over the human existence and more poignantly, the African American experience. In this July’s book from the aforementioned author, we find her characters battling with the far past of Africa, the not-so-distant past of the Jim Crow Era, the dark and uncertain present, and the vastly uncertain future. This proves to…