Chosen: A Memoir of Stolen Boyhood Hardcover – 26 April 2022

Truth is in its nature perverse. More proclaimed than lived. More tortured than loved. More sought than found. More hidden away than brought into light. In this incredibly brave book, a hero does the seemingly impossible to set truth free, and in so doing, as the saying goes, he sets himself free. Much praise is being given, rightly, to Chosen. Reading through the reviews, the bulk of the praise falls to its personal truth. For example, “game-changing memoir, Stephen Mills draws the reader into a boy's and then a man's journey through the wilderness of trauma.” Okay, this is a beautifully written first-person story and one that anyone with an ounce of introspection will thrill to read. But what struck me is that it is also a story of societal truth. Over the almost half-century that Stephen Mills wrestled with and ultimately took down a sexual predator of boys, we see how American society has grown, and mainly for the better. At a time when so much of the American story seems to be rotting and breaking, in this memoire we can trace the positive growth of core parts of society, including the professions of social welfare, of psychotherapy therapy and trauma care, and of law enforcement. Victims form into movements of self-care and forceful advocates for societal reform, and legislatures have responded. Institutions still default to protect themselves at the expense of victims, but the space in which they get away with that is narrowing. What I am left with after the cathartic tears have dried, is a subtle and brilliant study of how our polarized and broken society might remake the American dream. This is active dreaming. It is a dream of individual personal agency that journeys through a world where truth is perverse and arrives at the Beloved Community, a place where violence is not tolerated, and everyone has the right to act for the good of all. In this world, institutions of all types – business, government, nonprofit, professional – are held to a higher standard. Chosen transcends the divisions of class, race, and gender to show the universal path to our societal healing. Mills has provided a profoundly human portrait of what a truly inclusive America looks like. We can do this.