The Brother You Choose

By allowing for a naturally developing, first-person narrative of Paul Coates's and Eddie Conway's individual lives, the book provides readers with a factual but also emotional historical background of prison, political prisoners, and Eddie's case. The conversations between Eddie and Paul offer an informal version of their lives and the history delineated in Ta-Nehisi Coates's book. By no means factually complete, this is an account of the Black liberation movement and mass incarceration that relies more on what happens in the human heart than on what happens to society, in a larger, political sense.