The Reckonings: Essays Audiobook (Free)

“Unflinching and honest…both timely and timeless” (Houston Chronicle), this outstanding assortment of essays by the award-winning author of The Other Aspect—rooted in her very own experience with intimate assault—pursues questions that strike in the centre of our national discussion about the justness of culture.

In 2014, Lacy Johnson was giving a reading from your Other Part, her “instant classic” (Kirkus Reviews) memoir of kidnapping and rape, whenever a woman asked her what she would like to eventually about The Reckonings: Essays her rapist. This collection “tries to parcel out several knotted problems and suggests forms of meaningful justice” (Booklist, starred evaluate). Sketching from philosophy, art, books, mythology, anthropology, film, and her personal experience of violence, Johnson considers how our concepts about justice might be extended beyond vengeance and retribution to add works of compassion, tolerance, mercy, and elegance.

“The Reckonings is not a publication about changing the globe. It’s school of thought in disguise, similar parts memoir, criticism, and ethics…The twelve essays should have great consideration, while you read it and long after” (NPR). From “Speak Truth to Power,” about the health of not being believed about rape and assault; to “Goliath,” about the ways evil can be used as a form of public control; to “The Fallout,” about ecological and generational assault, Johnson creates masterful, intricate, gorgeously written essays that speak incisively about our current period. She grapples with justice and retribution, truth and fairness, and sexual assault and work environment harassment, as well as the broadest societal wrongs: the BP Oil Spill, authorities malfeasance, law enforcement killings. The Reckonings is a robust and necessary function, ambitious in its scope, which “challenges our culture’s expectations of justice and expose the limits of vengeance and mercy” (Ms. Mag).