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Outside the Law : Narratives on Justice in America
Outside the Law Narratives on Justice in America Author:Susan Richards Shreve SEVENTEEN DISTINGUISHED WRITERS ON THEIR PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF JUSTICE IN AMERICA — Seventeen extraordinary voices explore the difference, often achingly personal, between true justice and the law. These brand-new pieces use powerful storytelling--as current as Clarence Page writing on the Simpson trial and Blanche McCrary Boyd on Susan Smith--t... more »o define justice, to give it a face, to show how justice affects the lives of every one of us.
John Edgar Wideman uses his son's imprisonment for murder to reveal how law is often a tragic approximation of justice. Sarah Pettit writes on the "dizzy spin" of gay Americans who are told they are seeking "special rights." Julia Alvarez recounts the lingering effects of a brutal political regime on the civic behavior of her parents. Madison Smartt Bell examines the perhaps illusory idea of an inner sense of "true morality." And Charles Johnson imagines a black man, a white woman, and justice in the workplace.
These and other major voices--Michael Dorris, Ntozake Shange, John Casey, Richard Bausch, Alex Kotlowitz, Beverly Lowry, Daniel Wideman, Gerald Stern, Garrett Hongo, and Susan Richards Shreve --are brought together in this cogent and timely collection.
Justice is one of those palliative myths—like afterlife with acquired personality and memory intact—that makes existence bearable. As long as we can think that our experience of being periodically screwed by fate is the exception rather than the rule we can hope for, as they used to say in commercials, a brighter tomorrow.
Ntozake Shange:
I've found what I can call justice by forever returning to the root of a language, the design of a plantation, the workings of a sugar mill, the chants of streer corner B-boys, the words of those before me—Garvey, Marti, Diop, Machel, and the images of Bearden, Barthe, Michaux. I have to scrape the bottoms of souls, dreams, nightmares, and syllables to taste what justice might possibly be.
"[Works by] novelists, poets and essayists, professional users of language whose prose in these pages often soars to the lyrical."
--Colman McCarthy, Washinton Post Book World
BOOKLIST REVIEW BY KATHLEEN HUGHES:
"For this excellent collection of essays and stories, the editors asked several writers to examine the idea of justice. The results are startling: the essay by Blanche McCrary Boyd about Susan Smith (the woman who killed her two children in a failed suicide attempt then claimed they were kidnapped by a black man); Clarence Page's examination of the OJ Simpson Jury; Charle's Johnson's short story about affirmitave action (the head of a Seattle company is faced with the decision of whether to hire a white woman from a familiar social situation, or a black man who is equally qualified by unfamiliar); to Alex Kotlowitz's heartbreaking tale of two boys in Chicago, aged 10 and 12, who were recently sentenced to prison after dropping their 5-year-old neighbor to his death from the fourteenth-floor window of their public high rise. Some of the pieces are notable for their anguished personal tone, others for their thoughtful examination, poignancy, or objectivity. This examination of justice is both satisfying and an eye-opening read."