Nick Charles, Curtis Bunn, Michael H. Cottman and Patrice Gaines
PositiveThe Washington PostBy bringing together five journalists who each offer a take on the buildup to that summer [of 2020], the book functions as a time capsule that hopefully will be useful to future historians as they assess not just the impact of the protests but also the history of the police violence, and the organizing, that led to them ... The book is certainly engaging. The one downside is that at times, it felt as if the five journalists were simply contributing chapters on the theme of Black Lives Matter without any unifying narrative. At the same time, the chapters were oddly similar in style. A reader could easily think that the book had been written by a sole author, perhaps reshaped from a feature published in some newspaper or another ... the book is a welcome reminder of what is possible. And although it bills itself as recounting \'How Black Lives Came to Matter in America,\' it is much more than that, given its chapters on how the coronavirus wreaked havoc on Black communities, how the history of modern-day policing is inseparable from the history of slave patrols, Black organizing dating to the 1940s and broader issues such as income inequality.
