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The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, is a 2018 memoir written by Anthony Ray Hinton (with cowriter Lara Love Hardin)—a man who spent nearly three decades on death row in Alabama.  For his book and for subsequent activism to fight the death penalty at large, public figures from Desmond Tutu to Richard Branson praised Hinton's efforts. Hinton is now a renowned speaker on prison reform, forgiveness, and hope... Read The Sun Does Shine Summary

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America is a 2013 work of contemporary political science and history by the American journalist George Packer. It won the National Book Award in 2013 and was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award. The book explores the trajectory of the United States from 1978 to 2012 and argues that those years saw a diminishing of the institutions, promises, and social connections that had... Read The Unwinding Summary

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Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves, written by American journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, is a nonfiction work published in 2009. The subtitle accurately describes what the work accomplishes, and the book is the product of “more than five hundred hours of interviews with more than two hundred individuals who participated directly in the events surrounding the financial crisis” (vii). Sorkin, a... Read Too Big To Fail Summary

Anna Deavere Smith’s solo play relives three tumultuous days of rioting in Los Angeles in the wake of the first Rodney King verdict, issued April 29, 1992, when four, white Los Angeles Police Department officers were acquitted of charges of assault and police brutality in connection with King’s roadside arrest and beating on March 3, 1991. Caught on video, the King assault became a national media sensation, a disturbing vision of black-white race relations, and... Read Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 Summary

In 2003, Jon Krakauer, nonfiction author and journalist, published Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. Now the inspiration for a television series of the same title on Hulu, the story sent shockwaves as it explored religious extremism on American soil that closely resembled the Taliban-style extremism that had captured the country’s attention following the September 11 attacks. This guide refers to the 2004 paperback edition published by First Anchor Books.Content warning:... Read Under the Banner of Heaven Summary

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich is a collection of 35 first-person oral accounts of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union. Originally published in Russian in 1997, the book was translated into English by Keith Gessen in 2005; it has been translated into almost every European language. Alexievich, a Belarusian investigative journalist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for Voices from Chernobyl in... Read Voices from Chernobyl Summary

War, a battle journal by best-selling reporter and filmmaker Sebastian Junger, describes a year in the rugged highlands of Afghanistan with a platoon of American soldiers who face the worst fighting and toughest conditions of any unit in the US military. Published in 2010, the book describes months of mind-numbing danger, multiple firefights per day, injuries and deaths, and matter-of-fact heroism. The men display extreme toughness, gallows humor, and intense mutual loyalty despite the nearly... Read War Summary

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998) describes the Hutu majority’s slaughter of at least 800,000 Tutsis in 100 days in 1994—with author and journalist Philip Gourevitch documenting the meticulous planning behind the genocide. Gourevitch chastises the international community, especially the United States and France, for failing to stop the genocide in accordance with obligations under the Genocide Convention. Visiting Rwanda one year after... Read We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families Summary

Kate Fagan’s What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen (2017) centers on Madison Holleran, a promising young athlete at the University of Pennsylvania who committed suicide in 2014. This is a work of narrative journalism that grew out of Fagan’s award-winning ESPN essay “Split Image” (2015). Fagan brings her experiences as a college athlete on a Division I team and her expertise as a sports journalist to explore... Read What Made Maddy Run Summary