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Just Mercy (Young Adults)

Bryan Stevenson · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

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A Lesson Before Dying

Ernest J. Gaines · 256 pages

In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s. A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white

Wrongful ConvictionCourtroomRacismPrison
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Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Mandela · 638 pages

The riveting memoirs of the outstanding moral and political leader of our time, Long Walk to Freedom brilliantly recreates the drama of the experiences that helped shape Nelson Mandela's destiny. Emotive, compelling and uplifting, Long Walk to Freedom is the exhilarating story of an epic life; a story of hardship, resilience and ultimate triumph told with the clarity and eloquence of a born leader

RacismPrisonCourtroomMemoir & Biography
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The Chamber

John Grisham · 644 pages

John Grisham's bestselling backlist newly repackaged with fantastic new coversAdam Hill is 26 years old and in his first year at a top Chicago law firm. He voluntees for the toughest assignment any lawyer could ask for. His prospective client does'nt want Adam or his law firm. He is an unrepentent and outspoken racist with a violent past. He is on Death Row for the murder of two Jewish children in

Wrongful ConvictionRacismCourtroomPrison
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Black Like Me

John Howard Griffin · 190 pages

Publisher's description: Studs Terkel tells us in his Foreword to the definitive Griffin Estate Edition of Black Like Me: "This is a contemporary book, you bet." Indeed, Black Like Me remains required reading in thousands of high schools and colleges for this very reason. Regardless of how much progress has been made in eliminating outright racism from American life, Black Like Me endures as a gre

RacismAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyAmerican South
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In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance

Wilbert Rideau · 416 pages

From Wilbert Rideau, the award-winning journalist who spent forty-four years in Louisiana prisons working against unimaginable odds to redeem himself, the story of a remarkable life: a crime, its punishment, and ultimate triumph.After killing a woman in a moment of panic following a botched bank robbery, Rideau, denied a fair trial, was improperly sentenced to death at the age of nineteen. After m

PrisonRacismAutobiographyMemoir & Biography
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To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee · 309 pages

One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and voted one of the best novels of the 20th century by librarians across the United States. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poi

Wrongful ConvictionCourtroomRacismEmotional
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Malcolm X, Alex Haley · 484 pages

PrisonRacismMemoir & BiographyEmotional
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Monster

Walter Dean Myers · 281 pages

While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course his life has taken.

Wrongful ConvictionPrisonRacismCourtroom
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Wrongful ConvictionPrisonMemoir & BiographyAutobiography
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou · 281 pages

She was born Marguerite, but her brother Bailey nicknamed her Maya ("mine"). As little children they were sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Their early world revolved around this remarkable woman and the Store she ran for the black community. White people were more than strangers - they were from another planet. And yet, even unseen they ruled. The Store was a microcosm

RacismMemoir & BiographyAutobiographyAmerican South
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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass · 126 pages

This book is an autobiographical account by runaway slave Frederick Douglass that chronicles his experiences with his owners and overseers and discusses how slavery affected both slaves and slaveholders.

RacismAmerican SouthMemoir & BiographyAutobiography
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Zeitoun

Dave Eggers · 352 pages

From Goodreads: The true story of one family, caught between America’s two biggest policy disasters: the war on terror and the response to Hurricane Katrina. Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun run a house-painting business in New Orleans. In August of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approaches, Kathy evacuates with their four young children, leaving Zeitoun to watch over the business. In the days followi

PrisonRacismWrongful ConvictionEmotional
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A Calamity of Souls

David Baldacci

Wrongful ConvictionRacismCourtroomAmerican South
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Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

Trevor Noah · 297 pages

Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often ab

RacismPrisonAutobiographyMemoir & Biography
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Brown Girl Dreaming

Jacqueline Woodson · 368 pages

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.

RacismAmerican SouthMemoir & BiographyAutobiography
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Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup · 228 pages

Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation.

RacismMemoir & BiographyAutobiographyAmerican South
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Black Boy

Richard Wright · 288 pages

Black Boy is a classic of American autobiography, a subtly crafted narrative of Richard Wright's journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. An enduring story of one young man's coming of age during a particular time and place, Black Boy remains a seminal text in our history about what it means to be a man, black, and Southern in America.

RacismAutobiographyAmerican SouthMemoir & Biography
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The Green Mile

Stephen King · 465 pages

Welcome to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, home to the Depression-worn men of E Block. Convicted killers all, each awaits his turn to walk the Green Mile, keeping a date with "Old Sparky," Cold Mountain's electric chair. Prison guard Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities in his years working the Mile. But he's never seen anyone like John Coffey, a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a

Wrongful ConvictionRacismPrisonEmotional
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Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement

John Lewis, Michael D'Orso · 526 pages

The son of an Alabama sharecropper, and now a sixth-term United States Congressman, John Lewis has led an extraordinary life, one that found him at the epicenter of the civil rights movement in the late '50s and '60s. As Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lewis was present at all the major battlefields of the movement. Arrested more than forty times and severely beat

RacismAmerican SouthMemoir & BiographyAutobiography
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Almost Home: My Life Story

Damien Echols · 168 pages

Wrongful ConvictionPrisonMemoir & BiographyAutobiography
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Same Kind of Different as Me

Ron Hall, Denver Moore, Lynn Vincent · 240 pages

Memoir & BiographyRacismAmerican SouthAutobiography
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The Green Mile: The Screenplay

Frank Darabont · 182 pages

The Green Mile screenplay, written by Frank Darabont, is an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. It tells the poignant story of John Coffey, a death row inmate who possesses supernatural powers. These abilities force the guards and fellow prisoners to reexamine their lives. The screenplay remains remarkably faithful to the novel, capturing nearly every character and major scene, often with verbatim

Wrongful ConvictionRacismPrisonAmerican South
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Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

Martin Luther King Jr. · 230 pages

Chronicles the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott sparked by Mrs. Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat to a white male, describing the plans and problems of a nonviolent campaign, reprisals by the white community, and the eventual attainment of desegrated city bus service.

RacismAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyAmerican South
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Papillon

Henri Charriere · 544 pages

Describes the life of a man sent to prison on a miserable island, Cayena, where escape is impossible. It is a terrible life for him but he finally escapes after much suffering.

Wrongful ConvictionPrisonMemoir & BiographyAutobiography
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