Giving Up Is Unforgivable
A Manual for Keeping a Democracy
The first book from Joyce White Vance: equal parts civics class, history lesson, and call to save the Republic, Giving Up Is Unforgivable is a political manifesto for our present moment.
“We’re in this together.”
For the past two years, Joyce Vance has signed off posts on her chart-topping Substack, Civil Discourse, with these four words. In that time, she’s guided readers through a continued erosion of democratic norms, the unprecedented felony conviction of an ex-president, and the approaching specter of a second Trump administration. Now that it’s upon us, Vance helps us understand how to avoid burnout and despair and exercise the democratic muscles we need to save the Republic.
Giving Up Is Unforgivable is a clarion call to action—putting our current…
Available for Pre-Order
$37.99
October 21, 2025
Joyce Vance is the former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, an office she held during the Obama administration. She resigned on the eve of Donald Trump’s first inauguration at the end of twenty-five years of service as a career federal prosecutor. Vance is a Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law. She is a legal analyst for NBC and MSNBC, the author of the popular Civil Discourse Substack, and the cohost of two podcasts: #SistersInLaw and Cafe’s Insider. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband, Bob, a retired judge, and a menagerie of children, chickens, cats, and dogs.
