Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

"Ooooh, honey, all that's going to make you tired, tired, tired," Rosa Parks once told Bryan Stevenson when he breathlessly listed his ambitions for the Equal Justice Initiative, his shoestring legal-aid project: free the wrongly convicted, get people off death row and children out of adult prisons, stop racial bias in criminal justice, and much more. In his memoir, Stevenson organizes those tireless ambitions around a single case: the appeal of the death sentence of Walter McMillian for a murder he clearly did not commit. He's earnest rather than artful in telling his own story—which appears to be his style of lawyering too—but it's a powerful story of hard-fought successes against ongoing injustice that earns the comparisons to To Kill a Mockingbird and Tracy Kidder's biography of Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains.