RaveThe Washington Post...the most valuable service Tyson renders in The Blood of Emmett Till is simply to clear away the underbrush of myth that has accumulated over the decades and restore the immediacy of this quintessentially American story. He accomplishes this feat over the course of just 218 swift-flying and meticulously researched pages, bringing the story back to vivid life with a journalist’s nose for facts and a novelist’s eye for telling details ... Our history is a seething river of unpunished blood. So The Blood of Emmett Till is a work critical not just to our understanding of something that happened in America in 1955 but of what happens in America here and now. It is a jolting and powerful book.
Kia Corthron
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThere is significant flab on these bones, sins of writerly self-indulgence and authorial indiscipline. Even minor characters are run through mazes of back story and digression that add little appreciable dimension to the plot ... Which is not to say Corthron’s experimentation and license are uniformly frustrating. To the contrary there are whole chunks of writing here that are simply sublime, places in which one gets swept away by the way she subverts the rhythm of language to illuminate the familiar and allow it to be seen fresh ... what Corthron does best in this book: She blindsides you. She sneaks up from behind. Sometimes, it is with moments of humor, but more often with moments of raw emotional power.
J.D. Vance
PositiveThe Philadelphia Inquirer...a must-read for anyone seeking to understand Trump's appeal. Hillbilly Elegy is a compelling and compassionate portrait of a people politicians seldom address and media seldom reflect ... The one great flaw in Vance's book is a disingenuous near-silence on his kinsmen's attitudes about race ... Still, that flaw does not outweigh Vance's triumph, which is to give substance and dimension to those America has made invisible.