In her extensively researched memoir, Johnisha Matthews Levi widens the aperture on her life to uncover painful family threads. The panoramic view revealed is an evocative conversation starter on crucial matters of our times.
~Michele Harper, New York Times bestselling author of The Beauty in Breaking
An engrossing account of a daughter's relentless search for facts uncovers family details that reveal fundamental facets of the human condition. Number's Up is a provocative book that will transform its readers. It serves as a moving testimony to how one family's history is the history of what America was, is, and can be—if the nation's inhabitants have the collective will.
~Neil Roberts, coeditor of Creolizing Hannah Arendt
Johnisha Levi turns a personal story into social history in this gripping, essential memoir. I loved Levi's precise, swift, unsentimental prose style, her unshowy devotion to the truth.
~Karan Mahajan, author of the National Book Award finalist The Association of Small Bombs
Number's Up is a beautiful story of love and struggle told with courage and heart by a compelling narrator.
~Paula Blackman, author of Night Train to Nashville: The Greatest Untold Story of Music City
Midway through Johnisha Matthews Levi's masterful memoir, she relates a piece of advice from the grandmother of one of her mentors, Bryan Stevenson: 'You can't understand most of the important things from a distance. You have to get close.' In Number's Up, Levi dares to come face to face with family secrets that fundamentally change her understanding of the lives of her late Jewish mother and Black father. A poignant, sweeping story that reveals universal truths about family, love, abuse, race, and the blurred line between the personal and the systemic, this memoir will change the way readers see the world—and their own family's place in it.
~Andrew Maraniss, New York Times bestselling author of Strong Inside
Levi is honest, compassionate, and displays a genuine attempt to understand her family and the broader American culture regarding race and incarceration. I enjoyed learning more about her family history and its mysteries and nuances. Reading Levi's book is indeed like cracking a code, and she draws you in and guides you the whole way.
~Monic Ductan, author of Daughters of Muscadine
In Numbers Up: Cracking the Code of an American Family, Johnisha Matthews Levi takes readers on an emotional journey as she uncovers and comes to terms with her family's history. Through her brilliant storytelling, Levi crafts a very personal and brutally honest narrative that highlights themes of identity, resilience, forgiveness, and love. She tells a story of hope in the face of uncertainty and provides readers with a book that reveals the human spirit's capacity for healing and growth. Number's Up is more than a simple memoir or family history; it is a story of discovery and an intercessory prayer of thanksgiving and grace for an American family.
~Learotha Williams Jr., coeditor of I'll Take You There: Exploring Nashville's Social Justice Sites
Johnisha Matthews Levi has given us a captivating family story that humanizes the hustle of those who ran the Numbers. In this deeply researched memoir, she honors her complicated and complex parents with equal parts gratitude and candor, revealing how their making a way out of no way paved the way for her to thrive. A beautiful tribute. I couldn't put this book down.
~Bridgett M. Davis, author of New York Times Editor's Choice The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in The Detroit Numbers
In Number's Up, Levi deploys a mitigation specialist's mindset to investigate her father's case and the family history and societal forces that forged him. The result is a deeply humane and revelatory memoir of a daughter's quest to understand her talented and troubled father and quietly resilient mother.
~Kim Green, coauthor of Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes