A coolly delivered yet impassioned study of how much Trump’s election has shifted and revealed Americans’ thinking about...
A black writer tussles with race in the Trump era, taking his questions directly to the president’s supporters.
At the opening of this graceful and searching clutch of essays, Thompson (Twin of Blackness, 2015, etc.) explains that, at age 54, he’s at a crossroads. He’s long tried to think of race through the lens of idols like James Baldwin and Albert Murray, alert to racism but slow to anger over it, comfortable with white people while feeling that, often, “being American means being white.” But Trump’s election, and the racism it has exposed and often supported, has left Thompson unsettled. Taking his cue from another idol, Joan Didion, the author levelheadedly assesses the state of his racial temperament through memoir and reportage. He recalls his experience with race as a student and writer; his interactions with the children he’s raised and mentored; and the comfort he’s taken in jazz as a proxy for working through those struggles (these sections contain the author’s most lyrical writing). The heart of the book is Thompson’s reporting on interviews he conducted with three Trump supporters after the election to understand “what was going on in this country about which I had developed such uncertain feelings.” They’re not fire-breathing racists, but their masks as freedom-loving Americans often slip, revealing casually bigoted attitudes about blacks and Hispanics. Triangulating those conversations with chats with a Bronx-based nonprofit leader and the head of the National African American Gun Association, Thompson concludes that the most pernicious problem America faces regarding race, “the cold heart of the trouble,” isn’t ignorance or outright bigotry but indifference. The author isn’t despairing, but the book concludes with a sense that there’s plenty more work to do.
A coolly delivered yet impassioned study of how much Trump’s election has shifted and revealed Americans’ thinking about race.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59051-905-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
An authentic and fresh extension of the author’s successful Web series.
Writer, producer and director Rae, famous for her popular Web series, "The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl," channels her humor and attention to detail into this eponymous collection of personal essays about all the embarrassing moments that have made her who she is.
Sharp and able to laugh at herself, the author writes as if she's unabashedly telling friends a stream of cringeworthy stories about her life. Having grown up with the understanding that laughing at and talking about people was a form of entertainment and bonding, Rae continues the tradition by inviting readers into her inner circle and making her own foibles her primary focus. Almost 30, she opens up about nearly everything in her life, from her lifelong fear of being watched while eating in public to acutely awkward experiences with Internet dating and cybersex. The theme that race plays in this book is integral, although Rae's approach, as with all of her subjects, is decidedly humorous and lighthearted; she veers, always, toward a personal tone as opposed to one that's political or polemical. Her unwavering candidness, the sheer energy of her voice and the fact that she clearly finds herself to be terrific material make her a charismatic, if occasionally exasperating, narrator worth rooting for. Having been in a committed relationship for seven years, Rae unpacks how her Senegalese parents’ union contributed to her attitude (indifference) toward marriage. Some readers will find her proclamations and direct confessions offensive and be turned off; others may be offended but laugh out loud anyway. In Rae, her audience has landed on a singular voice with the verve and vivacity of uncorked champagne.
An authentic and fresh extension of the author’s successful Web series.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1476749051
Page Count: 210
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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