Powerful, wry essays offering modern takes on a primitive practice, from one of our most widely read death penalty abolitionists As Ruth Bader Ginsburg has noted, people who are well represented at trial rarely get the death penalty. But as Marc Bookman shows in a dozen brilliant essays, the problems with capital punishment run far deeper than just bad representation. Exploring prosecutorial misconduct, racist judges and jurors, drunken lawyering, and executing the innocent and the mentally ill, these essays demonstrate that precious few people on trial for their lives get the fair trial the Constitution demands. Today, death penalty cases continue to capture the hearts, minds, and eblasts of progressives of all stripes—including the rich and famous (see Kim Kardashian’s advocacy)—but few people with firsthand knowledge of America’s “injustice system” have the literary chops to bring death penalty stories to life. Enter Marc Bookman. With a voice that is both literary and journalistic, the veteran capital defense lawyer and seven-time Best American Essays “notable” author exposes the dark absurdities and fatal inanities that undermine the logic of the death penalty wherever it still exists. In essays that cover seemingly “ordinary” capital cases over the last thirty years, Bookman shows how violent crime brings out our worst human instincts—revenge, fear, retribution, and prejudice. Combining these emotions with the criminal legal system’s weaknesses—purposely ineffective, arbitrary, or widely infected with racism and misogyny—is a recipe for injustice. Bookman has been charming and educating readers in the pages of The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and Slate for years. His wit and wisdom are now collected and preserved in A Descending Spiral.

Fiercely moving, the two long narrative poems of Martín & Meditations on the South Valley revolve around the semi-autobiographical figure of Martin, a mestizo or "detribalized Apache." Fiercely moving, the two long narrative poems of Martín & Meditations on the South Valley revolve around the semi-autobiographical figure of Martin, a mestizo or "detribalized Apache." Abandoned as a child and a long time on the hard path to building his own family, Martin at last finds his home in the stubborn and beautiful world of the barrio. Jimmy Santiago Baca "writes with unconcealed passion," Denise Levertov states in her introduction, “but he is far from being a naive realist; what makes his writing so exciting to me is the way in which it manifests both an intense lyricism and that transformative vision which perceives the mythic and archetypal significance of life-events."

Science tells us what is. Technology tells us what can be. But neither can tell us what ought to be. As a science and technology journalist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jay Bookman has witnessed some of the most remarkable and exciting advances in human history-supercomputers, cyborgs, genetic engineering. Like the rest of us, though, he has also watched as ever-more sophisticated tools intended to make our lives easier and less stressful have often done the opposite. The problem, he says, lies not in our tools, but in ourselves. In Caught in the Current, Bookman and four friends embark on their annual rafting trip down the Deschutes River in central Oregon. Leaving cell phones, pagers, and laptops behind, they float for 60 miles through stark desert canyons, whitewater rapids and some of the best trout-fishing in America. But this is also a journey of another sort, an exploration of the many ways in which technology has altered how human beings experience each other and the world around them. We live today in the most connected society in history, and yet our sense of isolation has never been more acute. We communicate megabytes of data, but somehow knowledge or wisdom still escape us. The cell phone is our tool, our servant, but it is also a barbaric interloper that we have not yet dared to tame. In his finely tuned prose, Bookman contrasts the rhythm of life on the Deschutes with the increasingly fragmented and chaotic pace of our electronic age and reveals how the momentum of technology often breaks the flow of life. Our time is segmented into tasks to be completed; our personal interactions often take place behind a flashing cursor; our focus is "faster," not "better." Transfixed by the marvels of technology, we've overlooked its profound impact on our community. Neither a technophobe nor Luddite, Bookman accepts that technological change is inevitable and desirable. But in Caught in the Current, he also warns that we should not become passive subjects of that change, allowing ourselves to be tossed like helpless driftwood in the current.

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