MixedThe New York Times Book Review\"All of this is well-trod territory. There has been no dearth of ink spilled about Run-DMC, Aerosmith or hip-hop’s rise to cultural domination. So in a book that is occasionally hyperbolic yet fastidiously thorough — sometimes too thorough: Walk This Way grew from a long-form article and often feels better suited as one, unless you’re enthralled by the nitty-gritty of industry insider-ness ... Edgers gives us the hyper-amusing blow-by-blow of just how this duet came alive, from the back-and-forth of lyrical expletives in the studio — Run called Tyler’s lyrics \'hillbilly gibberish\' — to the recording of a music video that is both harbinger and metaphor for the song’s legacy ... There is an elephant in the room here, one that Edgers signals toward but ought to face squarely. What does it say about American culture that for an African-American art form to receive its due it had to not just seek white validation but cloak itself in the trappings of whiteness? ... Edgers tells the story with incredulity — behold how one song changed American music! — but in the context of American history the ending is actually an inevitability: If it hadn’t been hip-hop it would have been something else, because as Ralph Ellison pointed out in his famed Time magazine essay \'What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,\' American culture is African-American culture and vice versa...\'\
James McBride
RaveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewOur narrator is the sort of fellow with whom you’d happily get soused at a hole-in-the-wall tavern, and even accompany from Kansas along the Pottawatomie Creek, where Brown’s men kill five pro-slavery settlers, to Missouri, where Henry settles into life at a whorehouse … In disguising his light-skinned narrator as a girl, McBride taps into both the long legacy of racial passing and the race- and gender-bending tradition of American slave narratives, evoking one from 1860... in order to fashion a rich metaphor for racial identity … McBride sanctifies by humanizing; a larger-than-life warrior lands — warts, foibles, absurdities and all — right here on earth, where he’s a far more accessible friend.
