Recommended Reading

Mike has compliled a selection of significant books he wants you to know about and read. This list is recommended reading for anyone who wants to understand how the justice system has evolved into what it is today. It’s seperated into categories. We’ll continue to update it, so check back!

Walking the Walk:

Bonhoffer: Pastor, Prophet, Martyr, Spy
by Eric Metaxas
German Pastor and dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed in a concentration camp in 1945 for his part in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer strived to respond to the Nazi use of churches for propaganda and worked determinedly to grant the same rights to converted Jews as Christians under Hitler’s regime.

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of A New America
by Gilbert King
This Pulitzer Prize winning book focuses on Thurgood Marshall’s handling of an explosive case of racial strife involving the rape of a young white woman in Florida. The incident occurs right before Marshall went before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education and during the reign of Citrus barons who made their fortunes off of Jim Crow era labor. Marshall takes the case even after the Klu Klux Klan murders an NAACP lawyer and marks Marshall as next.

Memorandum during War
by Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman was driven to spend time with wounded soldiers during the Civil War after his brother was injured and hospitalized. The 40 notebooks that chronicle that period are a stark record of life as a medic. The link for this title includes the free Walt Whitman archive of the text.
Whitman expounds:

I wish I could convey to the reader the associations that attach to these soil’d and creas’d little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fasten’d with a pin. I leave them just as I threw them by during the War, blotch’d here and there with more than one blood-stain, hurriedly written, sometimes at the clinique, not seldom amid the excitement of uncertainty, or defeat, or of action, or getting ready for it, or a march. Even these days, at the lapse of many years, I can never turn their tiny leaves, or even take one in my hand, without the actual army sights and hot emotions of the time rushing like a river in full tide through me. Each line, each scrawl, each memorandum, has its history.

Situational Awareness:

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces
by Radley Balko
Rise of the Warrior Cop is an apt representation of this category of Mike’s books, as it describes how an average citizen’s perception of the current situation has changed to to adapt to adversity. Balko evaluates how military equiptment has become more common in local law enforcement agencies and how the “Castle doctrine” (man’s house is his castle) is now broken. It shows the proliferation of no knock warrants and examines how civil asset forfeiture has become a source of revenue to local governments.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
by David Eagleman
Mr. Eagleman’s website, which is linked to here, explains how, “The subsurface exploration [of the brain] includes waystops in brain damage, drugs, infidelity, synesthesia, criminal law, the future of artificial intelligence, and visual illusions–all highlighting how our perception of the world is a hidden and awe-inspiring construction of the brain.”

Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
Considered one of the best novels of the 20th century, this book is an experimental novel which examines the life of a black man in the jazz-age. It’s a satyrical reflection of segregated America. The opening lines of “Invisible Man” read:

“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

Smuggler Nation: How Elicit Trade Made America by Peter Andreas
“Smuggler Nation” examines how smuggling made an important contribution to the outbreak, conduct, and outcome of the American Revolution. It shows how our founding fathers rationalized and utilized illicit trade to power nation building.