The Sun Does Shine
Anthony Ray Hinton with Lara Love Hardin
Anthony Ray Hinton spent almost 30 years on death row in Alabama. In 1985, he was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder, but his only crime was being poor and black.
“He was a poor man in a criminal justice system that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent.” Bryan Stevenson
In a courtroom with an all-white judge and jury in a state where racial prejudice was rampant, represented by an incompetent court-appointed lawyer, and with the star witnesses being a bumbling ballistics “expert” and an acquaintance who lied, Hinton didn’t have a chance.
He spent his first three years in Holman State Prison in agonizing silence full of despair and anger toward all those who would send an innocent man to his death, but finally beginning to come to terms with his fate, he resolved not only to survive, but to find a way to live on death row. Sometimes that meant escaping into his imagination, but it also meant reaching out and becoming an inspiration to his fellow inmates, 54 of whom were executed mere feet from his cell.
This could have been a very depressing read, but instead it’s a story of a man who never lost his humanity, his sense of humour, or his faith in spite of all that was taken from him. It’s not an easy read. The injustice that Hinton endured at the hands of a legal system that knew he was innocent is absolutely horrifying, but it’s a story of a man who chose to forgive. It’s also a story of love and the power of friendship. Hinton’s mother, who died before he was released, never gave up hope that her “baby” would come home and his childhood friend, Lester, closer than a brother, visited him every single week for the entire time that he was incarcerated.
With the help of Bryan Stevenson, civil rights attorney and bestselling author of Just Mercy, and the Equal Justice Initiative, Hinton finally won his freedom in 2015. He was released into a world that had completely changed in the 30 years since his arrest; a bewildering world of computers, cell phones, and a woman’s voice in the car telling Lester when and where to turn on their way to visit Hinton’s mother’s grave! Now living in her house, which required significant work after sitting empty for several years, he dedicates his time to sharing his experience and speaking out against injustice and the death penalty which he calls a “form of lynching”.
He has never received an apology or any compensation from the State of Alabama and the real killer has never been apprehended.
Anthony Ray Hinton
Being diagnosed with a life-changing illness can be completely overwhelming. In Hope for the Best, Plan for the Rest, Drs. Sammy Winemaker and Hsien Seow offer a valuable guide to help patients and families deal with their new reality. Combining their decades of palliative care research and experience caring for seriously ill patients and harnessing the advice of thousands of patients, they offer 7 keys for navigating a life-changing diagnosis. With real-life stories, tips, and exercises, these compassionate experts empower patients with practical tools to help them successfully navigate the health care system with knowledge and confidence.
At the outset, Gina Holmes’ Crossing Oceans reminded me of a sappy Christmas movie. You know the ones… after several years away, beautiful young woman returns to her quaint mid American hometown where she encounters sweet, kindhearted, and inexplicably single man from her past who sweeps her off her feet and solves all her problems.
Like many children in wartime Britain, 10-year-old Agnes Crawford was sent out of London to the safety of the countryside where she lived with the well-to-do McIntyre family. Tragically orphaned by the war, she stayed on afterward as their maid and close friend of their daughter, Isobel. When tragedy strikes again, Agnes adopts her deceased friend’s identity and with it the opportunity to become a medical student at a London university. 
Not Our Kind is the story of two very different women whose lives intersect on a rainy morning in June, two years after the end of World War II. A minor traffic accident in New York City brings together Eleanor Moskowitz, a bright young teacher on her way to a job interview, and Patricia Bellamy, a socialite whose difficult thirteen-year-old daughter, Margaux, recovering from polio, needs a private tutor. When Eleanor goes to work for the Bellamys, she forms an immediate bond with Margaux, but because they live in a restricted building, she has to conceal her Jewish identity.
Until the end, when the two finally come together, this is really two completely different storylines connected only by a specific location.
In 2003, Morris, was introduced to Lale Sokolov, an elderly gentleman who “might just have a story worth telling”. As their friendship grew, Lale entrusted her with the innermost details of his life during the Holocaust. She originally wrote his story as a screenplay before reshaping it into her debut novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
In The Tattooist of Auschwitz, we are introduced to Cilka, a beautiful young prisoner who is forcibly separated from the other women by Johann Schwarzhuber, camp commandant, for his exclusive use. Quickly learning that her survival depends on it, she does what she has to do to stay alive. Although both books are historical novels, Cilka, like Lale, was a real person and at one point, he credits her with saving his life.
The subtitle of this short, but intriguing memoir, My Life as a Woman Living as a Man in Afghanistan, tells much about the content of the book, but it could also be misleading to those of us living in western cultures. This is not a book about living a trans experience.
How would you like to extend your life by 7.5 years? According to Dr. Becca Levy, Yale professor and leading expert on the psychology of successful aging, you might be able to do just that!
After reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, a 713 page novel about life in India in the 1970s and 80s, and then Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, I was looking for something light to read! Something frivolous and entertaining.
Following Augustine 