RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThoroughly researched, beautifully rendered and cogently argued ... The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley is at once historical biography at its best, literary analysis at its sharpest and a subversive indictment of current political discourse questioning the relevance of Black life in our country’s history ... Through his close readings of Wheatley’s poetry, Waldstreicher manages to both render a life and conduct a séance with an 18th-century Black woman whose thoughts and feelings are hard to discern ... Revelatory.
Clint Smith
MixedThe New RepublicIt is an ambitious undertaking, one that Smith narrates with a beauty that is often heartbreaking as it reveals (intentionally or not) our public education system’s failure to engage students with their history ... what is disappointing about Smith’s account is how he demonstrates, but never interrogates, the shallow nature of our current \'racial reckoning\' ... The impulse to debate the degree of wetness rather than the substance of water itself is a problem throughout ... This lack of engagement with history and Blackness beyond mythical origin story is precisely why so much of How the Word Is Passed feels like a shadow of more nuanced historical analysis ... for all his giftedness, Clint Smith is not a historian, and because of that, How the Word Is Passed mistakes surface observation for revelation.
Alice L. Baumgartner
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe story of how Black people in a slaveholding society affected federal policy by their movements, by their defiance and by their very existence has been told before. But rarely has this story been told as compassionately, or rendered as beautifully ... Significantly, [the] author take[s] the long tradition of Black resistance as a given; the book [is] not [a] study of racial exceptionalism, but of Black political agency as a persistent current ... masterfully researched, yet [the author\'s] greatest contribution lies in the radical implications of [her] thesis: that 19th-century American politics were shaped as much by Black resistance to enslavement as by the institution of slavery itself ... Baumgartner’s placement of fugitive slaves at the center of this story is not merely cosmetic. The fact that the commander in Nacogdoches wrestled with whether to grant them freedom, despite the legal precedent for doing so, shows how slavery, emancipation and empire were constantly renegotiated based on enslaved people’s movements across geographical and political boundaries.
Jonathan Daniel Wells
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn The Kidnapping Club, Wells shows how the \'booming and prosperous metropolis\' of antebellum New York City profited from the rendition to the South of escaped slaves who sought freedom in the North ... his narrative dissects the tragic effects of an organized group of local police officers, merchants and Democratic politicians who supported Southern slave catchers unleashed upon the city’s Black community by federal fugitive slave law ... one of Wells’s greatest contributions is his reminder that there were many Solomon Northups, and that some of them were children ... Black New Yorkers might have faced an insurmountable Goliath in the white political establishment, but by challenging the kidnapping club in court and on the streets, they were not entirely powerless.
Les Payne and Tamara Payne
RaveThe Atlantic...this kind of textured attention to Black life and community, whether in Omaha or Boston, Atlanta or Accra, distinguishes Les Payne’s masterful biography, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X ... a meticulously researched, compassionately rendered, and fiercely analytical examination of the radical revolutionary as a human being ... a portrait that pushes us beyond the adolescent hero worship that many in my generation cling to in our current political moment as we reread Malcolm X, C. L. R. James, Angela Davis, and other Black thinkers ... With new information gleaned from decades of research, Payne sheds fresh light on key moments in Malcolm’s political journey ... Because Payne takes the memories and views of Black communities seriously—because he never assumes that Malcolm’s Black contemporaries experienced him in the same way that we describe him in the present—The Dead Are Arising provides an invaluable glimpse into the mechanics of community mobilization led by Black women ... The Dead Are Arising forces us to ask deeper, more complicated questions about the Black people and places from which our heroes come.
