They Can't Kill Us All

This book was so damn good. Another book that should be required reading if only for the way you learn how the protests organically and inorganically formed back in Ferguson and Baltimore and later everywhere else in the US. There is no sugar coating things. There is no excusing what Michael Brown was doing before his murder. This is not a book intent on bashing the police. It is more like a diary examining the days surrounding Ferguson and all the days before and after when we saw more and more videos of unarmed black men dying at the hands of police.

There was a time when I thought, why don't they just stop resisting? But I've read. I've watched. I've listened. The idea of “the talk” that all black children get from their parents broke my heart. This wasn't the first time I've heard about it. A friend actually told me how she had given “the talk” to her 10 year old black son. But that this is a thing, a necessary thing, because black families live in CONSTANT FEAR that their children will be murdered while playing outside is a heartbreaking and terrifying idea to understand.

Lowery does a really good job of both reporting and inserting his own personal feelings about the subject. I thought this book would be, for lack of a better word, angrier, but it wasn't. It is mostly tinged with sadness and passion.

Appreciated the look at the process & inner-workings of on the ground journalism and what it takes to get a story. Also liked learning more about some of the early roots of BLM, as Lowery saw it. Don't know if the experience would be different reading rather than listening, but though the book is arranged in thematic chapters around the major horrific killings he covered, he veers all around in his thoughts and stories within each chapter, making for a very inchohesive and scattershot listening experience. Perhaps that's the the reporting work style, but it seemed disjointed and lost the arc of the storypower and then seemed to end randomly.