The Reckonings

June 1, 2018

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, the Edgar Award in Best Fact Crime, and more, Johnson's The Other Side made us feel the weight of her kidnapping and rape. The essays here were written in response to the question, What would she like to have happen to her rapist?

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 9, 2018
Johnson’s heart is in the right place with this wide-ranging collection of essays on suffering and inequality in 21st-century America, but her vision needs more substance. Johnson (The Other Side) begins by answering the question often posed to her about the boyfriend who raped and tried to kill her: what would she like to have happen to him? What she wishes, she says, is not revenge but for him to admit his crimes and “then to spend the rest of his life in service to others’ joy.” From there, Johnson launches into a series of meditations on sexual violence, her work with children with cancer, white privilege, the Deepwater Horizon spill, nuclear waste from WWII buried in a suburb of St. Louis, Mo. , the flooding of Houston during Hurricane Harvey, and Trump’s presidential victory. While one might agree that many of the situations she describes are disturbing (though conservatives may object to her election commentary), Johnson veers too often into preachiness (“Whatever kinds of ideas you have about people who come from wherever you are not from, stop holding on to them”). Commendably, she emphasizes humane ideals—peace, community, grace, joy—as a foundation on which to build a better world. However, by the book’s end, one wonders what she has to say that hasn’t been said before.

August 15, 2018
Who pays the costs of violence, whether waged against a person, group, or environment? That's the broad question Johnson (Creative Nonfiction/Rice Univ.) tackles in this follow-up to her 2014 memoir, The Other Side.While the author's previous book described her hellish experience as a victim of kidnap and rape, this book of essays takes the recovery process to the next level, searching for ways to redress loss without resorting to eye-for-eye retribution. Johnson has startled audiences by refusing to wish the worst for her own attacker: "I don't want him dead. I don't even want him to suffer. More pain creates more sorrow, sometimes generations of sorrow, and it amplifies injustice rather than cancels it out." Doling out punishment is easy; the challenge comes in creating change, especially in figuring out just where it begins. As her thoughts switch gears from the personal to the collective, the question of personal culpability increases. She's against racism, but she knows she has enjoyed white privilege in her role as a professor. She protests against the BP Deepwater Horizon spill but wonders if her own job--at a school that is also a BP beneficiary--doesn't in some way make her responsible. She asks, too, if rehabilitation is possible when the criminal is either a major corporation or, in the case of a landfill with World War II-era toxic waste, no longer around to face the consequences. "There is no one to arrest for this, to send to jail, to fine or execute or drag to his humiliation on the city square," writes the author. In the face of crimes that affect both the one and the many, she makes a plea for activism, art, and--as she experienced when her Houston home flooded last year--common decency.Johnson negotiates a path between vengeance and hand-wringing despair in this thoughtful and probing collection.

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Starred review from September 15, 2018
The opening essay of Johnson's collection answers this question: what does she want to happen to the man who kidnapped and raped her? In other words, what does justice look like? Readers of her memoir The Other Side? (2014) suggest her attacker should be put to death, but retributive justice does not satisfy Johnson. These essays attempt to parcel out several knotted problems and suggest forms of meaningful justice. In The Fallout, a group of mothers in a St. Louis, Missouri, suburb engage in activism to stave off the terror and powerlessness they feel upon learning that an uncontrolled underground fire burns in close proximity to both nuclear waste and their children. They inherited this problem from prior generations, and their best hope for solution?the EPA?is a bureaucratic behemoth. When reality is messy, so is justice. In Against Whiteness, Johnson reckons with race, which she argues is less about skin color and more about a system of punishments and protections. She implicates herself, offering her personal life up for examination, modeling what we all must do to achieve anything close to justice. Johnson's questions and answers are hard but necessary.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)