Book Thoughts: "The Confession" by John Grisham

Let me start out by saying this: being a huge Grisham fan, I think this is the best book he's written, and probably the most important. I think it must have taken a lot of courage for Grisham to write a book like this and put it out there in a climate as polarized as ours is right now, but it's a voice that deserves to be heard on an issue that is as important as life and death.

The main characters are a Lutheran Minister and a convicted sex offender. Odd pairing? Absolutely. However, the foil between the two is great and the trip through the minister's head and his thoughts as the story progresses is fascinating. The sex offender, just out on parole and dying with a brain tumor, limps into the pastor's office one morning and confesses to the rape and murder of a 17 year old Texas girl. The police in Texas arrested and convicted another man in the case, based totally off of a coerced confession. In this fascinating tale, the minister and the sex offender race against time and the well oiled Texas Capital punishment system to stop the pending execution of the innocent man, only 4 days away.

The story will leave you breathless, and at times it was so poignant that it drove me to tears.

Many of you will not like the slant this book takes. Grisham's own views on the death penalty, already widely known, are laid out crystal clear, and this will bother some people. He leaves you no wiggle room at all. In fact, if you are a die hard supporter of the death penalty, this book is likely to make you severely uncomfortable. He also paints our public officials in a very unpleasant light, particularly prosecutors and DAs, who have the sole authority in our system to determine who gets charged for what crime and how severe the charges will be. It is a position of awesome power. Others that he chastises along the way are politicians who go totally off of pole numbers, crooked cops who care more for convictions than truth, and right wing cable and AM radio talking heads who care more for their hair style and ratings than for the truth.

This book will confront you with a question: Do you think the Unites States has ever executed an innocent man or woman? If you don't think we have, you might want to do more research into the topic, because I promise you we have. With all the executions carried out over the years, no reasonable person would suggest that we've never killed the wrong guy. If you do think we've executed an innocent person or two, how does that make you feel? An innocent person being dead while a killer walks the streets? How many innocent people should have to die to maintain our system of capital punishment? Should we look the other way?

This book will ask all of these questions and more.

Book thoughts: "Mockingjay" by Suzanne Collins.

For this book, take all of the themes explored in the first two, all of the action, and ratchet it up about ten notches. All in all, a very astonishing and complex book. Brutal is also a good word.

The book brings a completion to the Hunger Games trilogy, and the story of Katniss Everdeen and the rebellion of the outlying districts against the power of The Capital. All I can say is, if you're looking for a "happy ending" you might not find it, depending on your definition of "happy ending." I will say though, that ending totally fits the themes developed through the books.

The allusions to the Roman Empire and it's epic excess and indulgence in violence are continued. Collins also exposes the horrors of war, so that even someone who thinks the undertaking of their war is just would have to sit up and look at the consequences.

Finally, the book provides a powerful message that despite who you think might be standing up for what's good and right, be careful, because most people also have their own agenda that they are promoting right along side these "moral views."

In the end, the whole series was thought provoking and I think everybody in America today should give it a read. These should become some of the most influential books of our time.

I'll be posting some more thoughts on this later.