The Reckonings

In 2014, Lacy Johnson was giving a reading from The Other Side, her “instant classic” (Kirkus Reviews) memoir of kidnapping and rape, when a woman asked her what she would like to happen to her rapist. This collection “attempts to parcel out several knotted problems and suggests forms of meaningful justice.”

Drawing from philosophy, art, literature, mythology, anthropology, film, and her experience of violence, Johnson considers how our ideas about justice might be expanded beyond vengeance and retribution to include acts of compassion, patience, mercy, and grace.

“The Reckonings is not a book about changing the world. It’s philosophy in disguise, equal parts memoir, criticism, and ethics…The twelve essays deserve great consideration, while you read it and long after” (NPR). From “Speak Truth to Power,” about the condition of not being believed about rape and assault, to “Goliath,” about the ways evil is used as a form of social control; to “The Fallout,” about ecological and generational violence, Johnson creates masterful, elaborate, gorgeously written essays that speak incisively about our current era.

She grapples with justice and retribution, truth and fairness, sexual assault and workplace harassment, and the broadest societal wrongs: the BP Oil Spill, government malfeasance, and police killings. The Reckonings is a powerful and necessary work, ambitious in its scope, which “challenges our culture’s expectations of justice and exposes the limits of vengeance and mercy.”