Lisa Kentgen's Reviews > When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

I could not recommend this book more highly.

Because it was evocative on so many levels, it is difficult to review. Maybe the best way is to acknowledge that I read it with trepidation because, while I felt like it was important to read, I have felt overwhelmed with how broken and wounded our country is in general. Yet from the first few pages of the introduction I knew how important this book is to read. I thought I was pretty aware of the impact of anti-black racism but this book woke me.

Reading about the treatment of her mentally ill brother was agonizing. As a psychologist I'm struggling with the inability of my profession to have a collective voice against the warehousing and abuse of the mentally ill and vulnerable. That Patrisse could hold those feelings around what she witnessed with her brother, and write about it, is remarkable. The author is an amazing human being.

The book is beautifully written. Of course it is memoir but it is also a collective memoir. We can't heal as a country until we come to terms with the cancer of systemic racism and its impact. Again, it needs to be read.

I saw a review by Kirkus which said something about how the narrative could drag on and might be for a select audience - and I thought that the reviewer could not have read the same book that I just finished.