In the last blog post, I mentioned I had a hard time finding a followup to 2 really good books I read last month. After rejecting ever book in my library TBR pile, I started rummaging through the multiple TBR piles around my house. (Tell me I am not alone in that!) In stack #2, I found a copy of a book recommended to me by a student a few years ago for consideration for summer reading. I never got around to reading it because […]
MLK: The Original Shade Thrower
Yesterday afternoon, I read Frank Bruni’s opinion piece, titled “The Wrong Way to Take On Trump.” Bruni – former political reporter turned restaurant critic turned opinion columnist for the New York Times – decided to school the American public on how we should “go high” when talking, protesting, and generally reacting to Trump. Except he didn’t really give specifics on what to do, nor did he interview any activists on their advice. Bruni spent the majority of this column telling us how we failed in […]
That time a Sheriff tried to lynch Thurgood Marshall
In 1949, a 17-year old white woman didn’t come home one night. The next day, she and her husband said she had been raped by four black men. Two of the men had helped the couple when they were stranded in their car. Two more were nowhere near the scene of the alleged crime-one was being arrested miles away. But that didn’t matter. The accusation of black hands sullying white maidenhood was enough to whip white Southerners in a frenzy. Only three of the accused […]
Same as it ever was
4.5 stars. I just can’t keep myself away from mystery books this year. And why would I even want to with fare as good as this? Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season was a really good book and I’m super excited to read her first book because I’ve heard it’s even better. Caren is a middle-aged black woman raising a young daughter on what used to be a Louisiana sugar plantation called Belle Vie. Her family worked the land for decades and Belle Vie is in […]
An Embarrassment of Riches in a Debut Novel
I’m not sure there could be a better time than now for this impressive debut novel from Kaitlyn Greenidge. She addresses racism, white privilege, female relationships, family strife, and loneliness in a novel that centers around a scientific experiment spanning some 60 years. Greenidge’s narrators are four African American girls and women who are intelligent but alone and lonely. Each is searching for a missing connection, for a love that has been missing and might even be considered forbidden or unnatural; each has felt alienation […]
An epic story told well
Yet another book filling in the gaps of my education. I could make this whole review a rant of how most American history tends to skip over everyone who isn’t white and male, but I’ll resist. The Warmth of Other Suns tells the history of The Great Migration, the period in history when 6 million black people fled the South and its Jim Crow laws to make a better life for themselves in the North and West. This migration was a big fucking deal that […]