A beautiful telling of a tragic story of reality. This felt accessible to teen readers yet relevant for adult readers as well.

A professor in political theory tries to make sense of her cousin's life and death through the examination of mass incarceration, penal and public policy. Her cousin Michael was first incarcerated at age fifteen for an attempted car jacking, of which the details are a little murky. Danielle Allen is the professor and author of this look at her cousin's life. Her intention here is to examine what went wrong after Michael's release and his death, three years later. Some of her writing has a showy feel to it especially when discussing her role in trying to rebuild Michael's life. She says about her role, "Not mine alone, no, but mine consistently—day-after-day as the cousin-on-duty, the one with resources, the one whose parents had been to college, and who was expected to go to college, and who had done so, and who had turned into a professional."

Okay. And her descriptions of Michael's mother, her aunt, were sometimes unpleasant and unnecessary, making this reader wonder how that added value to the text. Laying aside the personal and focusing on how little things can conspire to thwart a life focused on redemption is where this book becomes readable and utilizable.

"From here, any number of possible endings are still imaginable. But however broad the horizon of the imagination may be, events themselves unfold along a single track. Life may be a choose-your-own-adventure game, but we can live but one life. As we go, we shed all the other lives that might have been. From fourteen, Michael’s path ran from a broad horizon up and through difficult and merciless terrain."

She examines the changes in California law, where Michael was living at the time and how those changes and the increase in violence in the cities impacted sentencing, "They were designing sentences not for people but for a thing: the aggregate level of crime. They wanted to reduce the totality of crime; they didn’t have any interest in justice for any individual person, whether victim or perpetrator." Danielle laments the missed signs and signals from Michael's early years that, in hindsight perhaps family intervention would have played a role in changing the trajectory of Michael's life. She tried upon his release and reentry to really make his second chance fruitful. She helped him obtain employment, housing and his drivers license, but she couldn't keep him from making poor relationship choices that ultimately led to his early death. Finally , an unfortunate and sad tale of a life wasted but as Danielle reminds readers Michael is but, "one of so many millions gone."

As Danielle asks, "what went wrong" perhaps readers can find something in her questioning and in Micheal's brief live that serve as educational and cautionary to save a life and spare another family from the millions gone. Thanks to Netgalley and W.W. Norton for an advanced ecopy. Book publishes Sept. 5, 2017

Everyone needs to read this insightful book! It provides a personal but critical understanding of the oppressive factors that resulted in this young black man's untimely undeserved death. As a society, we owe a great deal to Professor Danielle Allen for writing this.