Reading about the Mike Brown protests now, almost 6 years later, is a weird thing for me.

At the time I was 14, about to start high school, and while I don't live in Ferguson itself, I was close enough that the tanks prowling the streets became normal. I remember vividly the day that the indictment was decided -- I remember sitting at my TV with my family, waiting tensely, and I remember getting the call that school had been canceled the next day mere minutes after Darren Wilson was declared innocent.

While Lowery's account is surely closer to the action than I was ever allowed to be, he perfectly captured the feeling in the city during those months.

It's happened again and again and again -- there was another round of major protests in St. Louis when I was a little older (and this time much closer to my home, since I live more or less near to where the newly elected mayor lived at the time) and now, as I'm writing this, in Minneapolis, the city I was born in.

This is a book review, so I'm just going to say that Lowery does a great job with this -- tying together the story at large with his own personal anecdotes -- and that while I've read countless articles on each of these events, the cohesiveness of this book is both incredibly convenient extremely well done,