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Recent Reviews
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Pan The Los Angeles Review of Books Williams wants to argue against the American public’s obsession with race...In so doing, however, he denotes very clearly the race and ethnicity of nearly everyone he encounters ... It is an unexpected example of the \'the only way to get over race is to constantly discuss race\' tack that \'anti-race\' conservatives typically disapprove of in the left...Can someone who has written his only two books on race really claim to have overcome it? ... [Williams] uses his unorthodox biography to support very idiosyncratic ideas, ones that he ultimately wants not to be seen idiosyncratically ... one of the biggest weaknesses with the book: Williams’s perplexing ideas on the nature of interracial marriage ... an elegantly written, pastiche-driven memoir that branches off into tantalizing but not fully explored ideas. If there is a methodological problem, it’s that there is no methodology. Put another way, Williams should have written a more boring book. Rather than quoting Faulkner, Camus, and Orwell, he might’ve quoted the work of contemporary scholars working on understanding and eliminating racial bias ... Nowhere in these pages does Williams give any indication that he is interested in complex questions of identity formation as it crosses with race ... Williams’s book is a polemic and it should have been a case study ... Williams will have to draw more convincing arguments from his very peculiar life.
Stephen L. Carter
Positive The Washington Post \"The meaty machinations of how the mobsters were finally brought to trial... are tailor-made for a Hollywood biopic. And Eunice’s fractured relationship with her brother Alphaeus, who graduated from Harvard, joined the Communist Party and served time in prison for contempt of court, is equally gripping ... But other, less dramatic aspects of Invisible drew my interest ... Indeed, Carter has a touch of wistfulness over the self-contained world of blacks, victims of a uniform anti-black sentiment, yet undeniably, defiantly proud of who they are ... Carter’s description of those odds [the black community is up against] is riveting.\
Danielle S. Allen
Rave The Los Angeles Review of Books Allen’s exceptional professional accomplishments make her latest effort, a memoir about the soul-crushing murder of her beloved younger cousin Michael, all the more stirring ... Cuz records Allen’s ongoing connection to Michael throughout his incarceration... It is a remarkable story of abiding filial love. It is also a painful look into the tenuousness of black middle-class life ... There is some respite for readers, too, from the more painful moments in Cuz in the more argumentative portions of the book ... In Cuz, Allen provides no immediately actionable solutions to the problem of mass incarceration that readers interested in public policy might wish for. But this, after all, isn’t the job of memoir.
Teju Cole
Positive The Washington Post Cole’s takes on everything are seen through the alternating long and short lenses of a modern writer steeped in history. His short essays are the best, simple and elegant...The longer pieces can be less satisfying ... One of the results of [Cole's] ambition is that a certain extravagance can sometimes inject itself into his otherwise judicious prose.