Begin Again
Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. Baldwin and Glaude, rereading Baldwin to arrive at Glaude’s writing and thinking today. Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again is actually three books wrapped together. One is an analysis of James Baldwin’s writings, revisited decades after his death. Alongside these close textual readings […]
Overground Railroad
Overground Railroad The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America My selection for Black History Month, 2021, was Candacy Taylor’s Overground Railroad. Is that a typo, you wonder? Nope, it is the story of The Green Book, African Americans’ answer to the AAA Travel Guide during the decades of Jim Crow Laws, […]
The Missing American
Missing American, African mystery untangled by Ghanian private detective Emma Djan If I were to summarize The Missing American in a single couplet, I would choose Sir Walter Scott’s well-known lines (ironically, and mistakenly, often attributed to William Shakespeare). Oh what a tangled web we weave When first we practice to deceive! Marmion, Canto 6, […]
Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents
CASTE, MORE OF WILKERSON’S METICULOUS RESEARCH In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson invites her readers to reconsider their inherent understanding of American societal layers. Drawing upon her meticulous research into the centuries-old caste system of India and her analysis of the relatively short-lived caste constructions of Nazi German, Wilkerson then applies the […]
Langston Hughes – A poet for BLM?
GOLDEN SLIPPERS: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers Poem: Youth Poet: Langston Hughes (1901 – 1967) Editor: Arna Bontemps Publisher: Harper & Row 1941 Youth We have tomorrow Bright before us Like a flame. Yesterday A night-down thing, A sun-down name. And dawn-today Broad arch above the road we came. We march! […]
The Underground Railroad
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD Is it true that Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad “traces the terrible wounds of slavery,” as Michael Schaub wrote in his NPR review of the novel? That sentence, more than one-hundred-and-fifty years post-Civil War and Emancipation, seems lamely inadequate to me. I don’t believe this book is yet another novel […]
Search for the New Land
Search for the New Land shook me awake and into the world of Julius Lester’s Black experience. Sometimes my reading habits set me off like a pinball machine. I’ve been reading about American literature and its uncomfortable (for me, a white reader) connection to racism. It’s a topic that’s been seriously on my mind since […]
Blood Dazzler
BLOOD DAZZLER I can’t think of a more appropriate book to review in this prolonged season of hurricanes than Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, her 2008 book of poems about Katrina’s record-breaking devastation. “What?” I can hear the moans, “Another poetry review?” Bear with me, dear readers, Blood Dazzler is unlike any book of poetry you’ve […]
Mercy
MERCY, A CLIFTON COLLECTION What a novel can do in three hundred pages, a good poem can do on one. Lucille Clifton does it in less than twenty lines, which is exactly what readers can expect from Mercy, a collection of 49 poems. On February 13th, it will have been two years since the loss […]