Oprah’s Book Club Summer 2018 Selection
“An amazing and heartwarming story, it restores our faith in the inherent goodness of humanity.”
– Archbishop Desmond TutuĀ
This program includes a forward written and read by Bryan StevensonĀ
The Sun Does Shine is an arresting audiobook memoir of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading, written by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn’t commitĀ
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.Ā
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.Ā
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.Ā
An Important And Accessible Book Most Americans are not aware of the degree to which our justice system is compromised, racist, and increasingly bent to the will of for-profit corporations. The tragic true story of Ray HinsonĆ¢ĀĀs conviction for a crime he didnĆ¢ĀĀt commit and the subsequent 29 years he spent in a 5×7 cell on death row in Alabama before he proved his innocence and won his release, however, will force societyĆ¢ĀĀs eyes wide open. And it will be easy to do so, because Hinson tells an easy to follow, compassionate,…
Hang in there… How could anyone spend 30 years on Death Row and be exonerated and still have the faith and the love that Anthony Ray Hinton did? I havenĆ¢ĀĀt cried while reading a book in a long time, but I could not hold back my tears as I lived through Mr. HintonĆ¢ĀĀs frustration with the Justice system. How blessed he was with unconditional love from his mother, his fiends Lester and Sylvia, and his God-sent lawyer, Bryan Stevenson. His observations from the darkness should give any reader a new respect for…
10: The story is Anthony Ray’s; the context is ours. Anthony Ray Hinton spent 30 years on AlabamaĆ¢ĀĀs death row for two murders he did not commit. And it wasnĆ¢ĀĀt new forensic technology that ultimately exonerated him. It was the perseverance of a handful of men and women willing to turn a mirror on the system itself.If there are books and there are novels, this is a story. ItĆ¢ĀĀs a powerful story full of loss, love, pain, honesty, hope, and, ultimately, survival. There is, however, no redemption here. There was no reason to ever believe…