RaveLos Angeles Review of Books...constant questioning, rigorous analysis, and lucid exposition—qualities Johnson’s writing displays in spades ... Johnson is helpfully and fluidly expository as she explores the versions of justice many Americans rely on ... Johnson spares no one (not even Obama) in her insistence that we question our thinking then and now about what constitutes justice as a nation ... her book is jam-packed with compassion. She does not appear to have any agenda beyond seeking to understand, to describe, and to grapple with the ways human beings behave—in other words, to empathize. In this moment of brazen racism, nationalism, xenophobia, and sexual violence, her willingness to sit with the nuanced difficulty of so many moral quandaries began to feel, to this reader, like a form of national service.
