The most urgent book I read this year was Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence, edited by Kevin Alexander Gray, Jeffrey St. Clair, and JoAnn Wypijewski (CounterPunch Books).

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Our Favorite Books of 2014 - Alternative Medicine and Medic Against Bomb: A Doctor's Poetry of War

The most urgent book I read this year was Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence, edited by Kevin Alexander Gray, Jeffrey St. Clair, and JoAnn Wypijewski (CounterPunch Books). With the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, it couldn't be more timely. This book flashes a spotlight on police violence and on Stand Your Ground laws. It intersperses court documents from the Trayvon Martin case with commentaries from more than sixty writers (full disclosure: I have a small part in here). Powerfully put together and including amazing poems from Rita Dove, the late June Jordan, and Tara Skurtu, this book, as the editors write, "is an incitement to justice."

Speaking of poetry, I'd like to salute two terrific books that came out this year, both written by doctors.

The first, by Rafael Campo, is Alternative Medicine (Duke University Press). A formalist, he writes about his father's Cuba, immigrants, being gay and in love, poetry, 9/11, and most grippingly, about being a physician. In "Why Doctors Write," he says:

A doctor writes because he must, because not one...