RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksEverett really lets it rip. With a Twainian level of wit and meanness, he has crafted a comic condemnation of whiteness and an argument for retributive justice that could just as easily be called \'The Fire This Time\' ... This hilarious novel of revenge and reckoning is a narrative correction. Here Everett has consigned his usual restraint to the boneyard, condemning racial violence with broad strokes. While it is a very funny book, what lies at its core is the idea that Black deaths matter ... Everett’s cast of white crackers display a degree of idiocy and sloth that borders on epic ... Everett holds these bozos over the flames like so many marshmallows, charring them to perfection. Which raises the question: how can a book about the scope and horror of lynching be such a side-splitting page-turner? Perhaps because revenge, even fictional revenge, is particularly sweet when it is so long overdue ... The book does sag a little in the middle ... Everett’s book, with its masterly fusion of detective fiction and supernatural avenger fantasy, transcends the familiar themes of white cruelty and Black victimhood to explore Black agency through the tropes of both genres. It is furious, political, and historical, but it is also art—an example of the kind of radical imagining that can bridge the gap between reality and fantasy, that can take us beyond historical oppression toward an understanding of Black agency that is more complex than an Afro or a raised fist on a poster.
David W. Blight
RaveLos Angeles Review of Books\"... commanding and meticulously researched ... well-crafted tour de force ... in David Blight, we have a historian whose elegant, suitably lofty prose is up to the task of describing the life and work of a man who believed deeply in the transformative power of the word. Blight brings a deft hand to his portrait of a prophet who was, after all, human. While many of the contradictions in Douglass’s life were the subject of rumors and half-truths in his own time, Blight explores them fully and tactfully without succumbing to the temptations of historical gossip. In Prophet of Freedom, Blight allows us to experience both the exuberance and the difficulties of a life acted out on stages ... But Blight does more than provide us with a microscopic view of Douglass’s genius and his humanity. By foregrounding the story of one extraordinary man, Blight also delivers the larger story of four of the most dramatic decades in our national history, for which Frederick Douglass provides a stentorian voice-over ... There are a number of problems that Blight inherits with this territory, the first being that Douglass told his own story three times and told it well. There is much to trust in these narratives, and Blight has done a stunning job working with them to create a vibrant collage of a momentous life ... [Blight] is exceptionally sharp in his deconstruction of Douglass’s constant self-creation.\
Heather Ann Thompson
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books…a compassionate, exhaustively researched, and brilliantly paced account of the events that began on September 9, 1971, when inmates seized control of an upstate New York prison, and which, 46 years later, still resonate in the courts and in the hearts, minds, and still-damaged bodies of the Attica survivors and their families … provides us with nothing less than a road map of American racism… Thompson draws us into the heart of our national darkness ... Blood in the Water has been criticized in some quarters for softening the edges by underplaying the radicalism that fueled the uprising, and there is a kernel of truth in this … focus more on their humanity than their ideology … Thompson is a lucid and cinematic writer, and her superb descriptive powers take the reader into the chaos of the initial uprising and the resourceful improvisations that followed.