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Peniel E Joseph
Mixed The New York Times Book Review It is hard not to be swept up by Joseph’s soaring rhetoric. But while The Third Reconstruction is full of insights, it is ultimately unpersuasive — if anything, the heights to which Joseph elevates Black Lives Matter also sets up the movement for a fall ... The problem is not with the movement, but with the idea that it has to fit into a grand historical pattern. The First and Second Reconstructions were in part the fruits of abolitionists and civil rights activists, but they also occurred at times when the country was politically and culturally ripe for change...But there is no modern equivalent of Thaddeus Stevens or Lyndon Johnson. And even if there were, for all the varied energies and moral strengths of the Black Lives Matter movement, there is no groundswell of public support for reform on the scale of those earlier moments ... Joseph writes in a smooth, compellingly readable style, though he often does so in a hyperbolic register...And he often refers to Black Lives Matter in the past tense, which perhaps unintentionally implies that the movement has run its course ... changing how we talk is not the same as claiming victory for the oppressed, or even a reorientation of the national consensus around them. In a decade, or five, we may in fact look back at the last 10 years as a period of racial change akin to the 1860s or the 1960s. But it is too early to write that history.
William Gay
Positive The Nashville Scene ...Gay’s writing doesn’t capture Middle Tennessee—it is Middle Tennessee, as much a part of the landscape as its fields and barns and creeks. Every turn of phrase, every scene describes with effortless perfection the curve of a hill, the angle of an eave, the lilt in a drawl ... alive with the lived authenticity that makes his fiction so intensely real and important ... But ... this new novel is uneven, with a structure and pacing that feel unbalanced ... Some characters are fully fleshed-out, only to disappear in the text; others, who end up with major roles toward the end, are thinner than paper ... What makes The Lost Country worth reading is Gay’s descriptive mastery, more mature and on fuller display here than even his best earlier efforts ... Nor is there much in the way of plot, at least in the overarching-events-in-a-line sense. Gay is much more interested in mood and texture—in particular the mood and texture of rural Tennessee in the 1950s, on the cusp of entering the modern world ... Everyone in the book is struggling for meaning—direction, purpose, status, desire, permanence, whatever it takes to pull them up from the anonymous poverty of their past ... I read every word of The Lost Country with hunger—Gay is the sort of writer who could make tax forms exciting—but none more than those of the last several pages.
Linda Gordon
Rave The New York Times Book Review [Gordon] rejects the academic’s commitment to history for history’s sake in favor of a perspective on the past that explicitly comments on the present ... It’s hard to finish a single page in Gordon’s book without a slight tingle of fearful familiarity, of reverberations in rhetoric and public opinion — a recognition that, maybe, it has always been thus ... They say the job of an anthropologist is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, and something similar goes for the historian. I can think of few books that accomplish this task as well as Gordon’s: In her telling, the second Klan is at once utterly bizarre and undeniably American. The 2010s may not be the 1920s, but for anyone concerned with our present condition, The Second Coming of the KKK should be required reading.
Douglas Brinkley
Positive The New York Times Book Review “Rightful Heritage is in several ways a more engrossing book than Wilderness Warrior. Many of Teddy’s environmental achievements remain in place today, but his perspective, for all its forward-looking rhetoric, was focused on pulling back from the excesses of the Gilded Age. And his accomplishments, impressive as they were, were possible only because the rest of the country had yet to catch up with him; one gets the sense that corporations, Congress and the public often simply watched in awe as his pen strokes created vast stretches of publicly protected wilderness. But that was the easy part. By the 1930s, Franklin understood, it was no longer enough to protect the natural resources America had left; after a century of industrialization, the landscape was as bankrupt as the economy.