Genre: Memoir / Contemporary
Book Type: Audio
Author: Anthony Ray Hinton, Lara Love Hardin and Bryan Stevenson (Foreword)
Narrator: Bryan Stevenson - foreword and Kevin R. Free
Pages / Length: 288 pages / 9 hours and 11 minutes
Publisher: St. Martin's Press (June 5, 2018) / Macmillan Audio
Book Description:
In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder in Alabama. Stunned, confused, and only twenty–nine years old, Hinton knew that it was a case of mistaken identity and believed that the truth would prove his innocence and ultimately set him free.
But with no money and a different system of justice for a poor black man in the South, Hinton was sentenced to death by electrocution. He spent his first three years on Death Row at Holman State Prison in agonizing silence―full of despair and anger toward all those who had sent an innocent man to his death. But as Hinton realized and accepted his fate, he resolved not only to survive, but find a way to live on Death Row. For the next twenty–seven years he was a beacon―transforming not only his own spirit, but those of his fellow inmates, fifty–four of whom were executed mere feet from his cell. With the help of civil rights attorney and bestselling author of Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, Hinton won his release in 2015.
With a foreword by Stevenson, The Sun Does Shine is an extraordinary testament to the power of hope sustained through the darkest times. Destined to be a classic memoir of wrongful imprisonment and freedom won, Hinton’s memoir tells his dramatic thirty–year journey and shows how you can take away a man’s freedom, but you can’t take away his imagination, humor, or joy.
Thoughts:
While this book was a bit repetitive at times, it also absolutely enraged me at the injustices that occur within this country. I am appalled at the racism that still exists, and while this was set 30 to 40 years ago, it breaks my heart at how long Ray needed to suffer for something that he didn’t do. I know we have made progress since the time this occurred, but it also still happens and has me thinking of things on such a larger scale.
Ray stated that he understood “an eye for an eye,” and it is something that I have never understood. As Ghandi once said, “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” How can we accept that what one person does makes it acceptable for the other person to do it back? It is something my head cannot, and will not, understand.
I really enjoyed Ray’s “character,” as in who he is as a man. He knew he was wrongfully convicted and worked to keep his mind in a healthy place for when he hoped to get out - and in doing so, helped others. While heartbreaking, I appreciated the story between him and Henry, to show how some behavior is learned but can be broken. It gives me hope that we can get past these invisible barriers that can separate us at times. I greatly enjoyed him using books as a common ground to discuss things (speaking as someone who started a book club, it melted my heart and loved that connection as to me - books are a universal language and can make everyone connect on some level).
Overall, this was an incredibly heartbreaking read, but also inspiring, eye-opening, heartwarming and frustrating. There were times I cried, times I yelled out loud, times I wanted to scream at the individuals in the book, and times when my heart felt like there is hope. I thought the pace was good for this book and liked how it was broken up. Not my normal genre, but very glad I read it.
Favorite Quotes:
⚖️ There's no way to know the exact second your life changes forever. You can only begin to know that moment by looking in the rear view mirror. And trust me when I tell you that you never, ever see it coming. Did my life change forever the day I was arrested? Or did the life changing moment happen even earlier? Was that day just the culmination of a whole series of fateful moments, poor choices, and bad luck? […] But pain and tragedy and injustice happen – they happen to us all. I’d like to believe it’s what you choose to do after such an experience that matters the most – that truly changes your life forever.
I’d really like to believe that. (Page 1)
⚖️ There's no sadder place to be in this world than a place where there's no hope. (Page 4)
⚖️ I was taught to remain calm. When you win, you stay calm. When you lose, you stay calm. Now, don't get me wrong, I wanted to win. Nobody likes to lose in baseball or in anything. But my mom always taught me that if you have a tantrum out there on the field and let the other team know they've upset you, it's like losing twice. (Page 15)
⚖️ He (Lester) just shook his head at me when I told him I'd rather be poor in the light than rich in the dark. (Page 29)
⚖️ He (Lester) just shook his head at me when I told him I'd rather be poor in the light than rich in the dark. (Page 29)
⚖️ In the month leading up to his execution, he cried every day. He cried on the yard. I had never heard anyone cry like that before, but I remained silent. He cried as the Death Squad practiced marching in front of his cell, and he cried as they went into the death chamber and turned the generator on to test Yellow Mama. He cried as the lights flickered, and he cried at night when the lights went out. The guards practiced their ritual for killing him, and then they would ask him how he was doing and did he need any thing as if they weren't rehearsing his murder. It was gruesome to watch, and it only made Michael Lindsey's terror grow. On the Monday before his execution, you could hear him begging and pleading with a guy named Jesse who had just started something called Project Hope to fight the death penalty from within Holman. Jesse had no power. He was on death row too. But Michael Lindsey begged him to save his life. It was heartbreaking and painful. (Page 100)
⚖️ We didn't say much after that, but the row was pretty quiet that night. We weren't monsters; we were guys trying to survive the best we could. Some times you need to make family where you find it, and I knew that to survive I had to make a family of these men and they had to make a family of me. It didn't matter who was black and who was white-all that kind of fell away when you lived a few feet away from an electric chair. Right now, we had more in common than not. We all faced execution. We all were scrambling to survive.
Not monsters.
Not the worst thing we had ever done.
We were so much more than what we had been reduced to so much more than could be contained in one small cage. (Page 136).
⚖️ The pain one man can cause another is limitless, but I didn't see I couldn't see how creating more pain made anything better. When you took a life, it didn't bring back a life. It didn't undo what was done. It wasn't logical. We were just creating an endless chain of death and killing, every link connected to the next. It was barbaric. No baby is born a murderer. No toddler dreams of being on death row someday. Every killer on death row was taught to be a killer-by parents, by a system, by the brutality of another brutalized person but no one was born a killer. My friend Henry wasn't born to hate. He was taught to hate, and to hate so much that killing was justified. No one was born to this one precious life to be locked in a cell and mur dered. Not the innocent like me, but not the guilty either. Life was a gift given by God. I believed it should and could only be taken by God as well. Or whatever a man believed in. It didn't matter to me. But God never gave the guards, or the warden, or the judges, or the State of Alabama, or the federal government, or the people the right to take a life.
Nobody had that right.
I was afraid every single day on death row. And I also found a way to find joy every single day. I learned that fear and joy are both a choice. (Page 186)
⚖️ I woke up to a bootleg book club discussion. The thought of book club made me sad. When I thought of it, all I could think of was those empty chairs in the library as they killed us off one by one. First Larry, then Horsley; Henry, then Brian, and finally Victor. Nothing but empty chairs with every execution. After they had closed us down, the books we had read, plus some new ones, circulated around the tiers. There was no meeting in the library, but would talk about the books, yelling from cell to cell. If you guys could hadn't read the book, you just listened. If you had read the book, you give ideas, offer opinions. And always questions got thrown to me, as if I were the book club teacher. I didn't know the answers, and I told the guys that. There was no right or wrong in book club. You just had your own thoughts and interpretations and beliefs and ideas. It was new for a lot of guys. Giving their honest opinion, and having that listened to and respected, was a new kind of drug that traveled around the row. Matters of the heart were discussed. Politics were discussed. Racism and poverty were discussed. Violence was discussed. And if you had already discussed the book, you let others have the discussion, let them have a chance to talk their way through the big ideas. (Page 195).
⚖️ I read the article again and again. Next to it in the paper was an oppos ing opinion piece-pro death penalty-by the attorney general, Troy King. His basic argument was an eye for an eye, and I understood that. I had grown up with that in church. Justice demanded a life for a life. Retribution. The perpetrator should not live while the victim has no choice. People on death row had earned their spots on death row, and justice cannot be consumed with protecting the rights of the guilty. But the system didn't know who was guilty. I wasn't blind. There is a moral difference between kidnapping and murdering a man, and imprisoning and executing a man. There is no moral equivalence, even when both things end in death. But death has never deterred death. And we can't be sure of guilt, save for an admission of guilt. A person could believe in the death penalty and still believe it should be ended, because men are fallible and the justice system is fallible. (Page 211).
⚖️ Why do we judge some people less worthy of justice? Why does innocence have a price? McGregor passed away, and he wrote a book before he died. He mentions me in the book and says how evil I am. How clever a killer I was. How he knew just from looking at me that I was guilty. I forgive him. Someone taught him to be racist, just as someone taught Henry Hays. They are two sides of the same coin. (Page 240).
⚖️ The death penalty is broken, and you are either part of the death squad or you are banging on the bars.
Choose. (Page 244).
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
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