The Reckonings
Essays
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“Unflinching and honest…both timely and timeless” (Houston Chronicle), this extraordinary collection of essays by the award-winning writer of The Other Side—rooted in her own experience with sexual assault—pursues questions that strike at the heart of our national conversation about the justness of society.
In 2014, Lacy Johnson was giving a reading from The Other Side, her “instant classic” (Kirkus Reviews) memoir of kidnapping and rape, when a woman asked her what she would like to happen to her rapist. This collection “attempts to parcel out several knotted problems and suggests forms of meaningful justice” (Booklist, starred review). Drawing from philosophy, art, literature, mythology, anthropology, film, and her own experience of violence, Johnson considers how our ideas about justice might be expanded beyond vengeance and retribution to include acts of compassion, patience, mercy, and grace.
“The Reckonings is not a book about changing the world. It’s philosophy in disguise, equal parts memoir, criticism, and ethics…The twelve essays deserve great consideration, while you read it and long after” (NPR). From “Speak Truth to Power,” about the condition of not being believed about rape and assault; to “Goliath,” about the ways evil is used as a form of social control; to “The Fallout,” about ecological and generational violence, Johnson creates masterful, elaborate, gorgeously written essays that speak incisively about our current era. She grapples with justice and retribution, truth and fairness, and sexual assault and workplace harassment, as well as the broadest societal wrongs: the BP Oil Spill, government malfeasance, police killings. The Reckonings is a powerful and necessary work, ambitious in its scope, which “challenges our culture’s expectations of justice and expose the limits of vengeance and mercy” (Ms. Magazine).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Johnson's heart is in the right place with this wide-ranging collection of essays on suffering and inequality in 21st-century America, but her vision needs more substance. Johnson (The Other Side) begins by answering the question often posed to her about the boyfriend who raped and tried to kill her: what would she like to have happen to him? What she wishes, she says, is not revenge but for him to admit his crimes and "then to spend the rest of his life in service to others' joy." From there, Johnson launches into a series of meditations on sexual violence, her work with children with cancer, white privilege, the Deepwater Horizon spill, nuclear waste from WWII buried in a suburb of St. Louis, Mo. , the flooding of Houston during Hurricane Harvey, and Trump's presidential victory. While one might agree that many of the situations she describes are disturbing (though conservatives may object to her election commentary), Johnson veers too often into preachiness ("Whatever kinds of ideas you have about people who come from wherever you are not from, stop holding on to them"). Commendably, she emphasizes humane ideals peace, community, grace, joy as a foundation on which to build a better world. However, by the book's end, one wonders what she has to say that hasn't been said before.
