Summer Reading List: Just Mercy

Just Mercy - Bryan Stevenson

The UC Berkeley Summer Reading List is an annual compilation of recommended (though not required) readings suggested by Cal faculty, staff, and students as a welcome to incoming freshmen and transfer students.

This week we take a closer look at Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Bryan Stevenson, New York : Spiegel & Grau, 2014.

Among the first things UC Berkeley will send the incoming class of 2020 is this book that will form the centerpiece of this fall’s On the Same Page program.

“Passion, commitment, justice, brutality, the defense of the condemned. In Just Mercy, Brian Stevenson–he’s been called America’s Nelson Mandela, America’s Atticus Finch–sears the reader in his telling of his fight as a young lawyer for social justice on behalf of the poor and the disadvantaged. Just Mercy grips you like the best of novels, bringing you into the lives of the most desperate of people caught in systems of imperfect justice. Stevenson makes us despair that just mercy is beyond our reach, but fills us with glimmers of hope that it is also always within our grasp. Just Mercy is about human suffering and guilt, about the morality of punishment, about poverty and the law, and about the possibilities for heroic action in an imperfect world.”

– ALAN TANSMAN, Professor East Asian Languages and Cultures


Post contributed by:
Michael Larkin Lecturer, College Writing Programs
Tim Dilworth First Year Coordinator, Library