RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewLaura Coates, an attorney turned CNN senior legal analyst, is a talented storyteller. Her new book, Just Pursuit, is a compelling collection of engaging, well-written, keenly observed vignettes from her years as a lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice. But Coates’s stories, instead of trying to aggrandize her as an attorney, have a different and more profound purpose: They illustrate the injustices of our criminal justice system ... gripping ... ever-observant ... It’s storytelling that can make people understand the racial inequities of the legal system, and it’s storytelling that can restore the humanity this system has cruelly stripped from its victims.
Kristin Henning
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... a rich combination of stories about her clients, copious data about juvenile justice and painstaking research into high-profile cases like those of Emmett Till, the Central Park Five, Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice ... Henning makes her case by looking at everything from rap music to city ordinances banning \'saggy pants\' to sexual stereotypes about Black teenagers. The result is a book that is comprehensive and convincing, exhaustive and exhausting—occasionally repetitive, and sometimes bogged down in a flurry of facts. But these quibbles aside, The Rage of Innocence is a serious and thoughtful book about a subject of great importance, and it deserves to be widely read.
Emily Bazelon
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... a persuasive indictment of prosecutorial excess ... rich, novelistic prose ... Bazelon interweaves Kevin’s and Noura’s stories with a remarkable amount of academic research by law professors, criminologists and other social scientists. The endnotes, replete with charts and graphs, run to more than 50 pages and acknowledge intellectual debts to such thinkers as Angela J. Davis, Paul Butler, Michelle Alexander and William Stuntz. This combination of powerful reporting with painstaking research yields a comprehensive examination of the modern American criminal justice system that appeals to both the head and the heart.
