PositiveThe Washington PostThe arc of Lewis’s life is ably accounted for in historian Raymond Arsenault’s new book, John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community, though it sometimes drains its subject of his dynamism, focusing on the bare facts of his life at the expense of emotional punch ... He offers the first comprehensive biography of the late civil rights giant ... The result is a work that doesn’t quite resurrect Lewis — turn text into flesh — even if it promises to be a compelling academic tool.
Michael Finkel
RaveThe Washington PostCaptivating ... Snackable ... But while the book is, as the subtitle says, a story of crime, it’s also, on a quieter level, an exploration of archiving and ownership ... Finkel, through meticulous research and extensive investigation of trial and interview transcripts, does nudge us to consider: What is the best way to preserve the past? ... 38 breezy chapters ... The last third of the book — which charts the months after Breitwieser’s arrest, when the authorities attempted to figure out what happened to the stolen artwork — is particularly enthralling. In animated and colorful prose, Finkel summons the emotional intensity of a murder mystery.
Elliot Page
RaveThe Washington Post...eloquent and enthralling ... charts the tremendous emotional and psychological effort it took for him to confront suffocating social messaging about gender and sexuality. Viewed in this light, Page’s book, which arrives at a moment of heightened anti-queer hostility, as Republican legislators across the United States push a record number of bills chiseling away at LGBTQ+ people’s rights, is many things at once: memoir, yes, but also cultural analysis and civil rights cri de coeur ... Pageboy doesn’t focus solely on pain. Some of the book’s most moving parts paint vivid pictures of Page’s touching relationship with his mother, Martha ... The book is an intense, emotional read, delivered in image-drenched prose ... Ultimately, Page performs a remarkable alchemy. He marshals memories and turns them into an appeal. \'Let me just exist with you,\' he writes, \'happier than ever.\' Reading those words nearly made me cry. Page’s plea is small. It also feels very big.
Imani Perry
PositiveSlate...Perry mines Hansberry’s life, her indefatigable radicalism, and her queerness, and she prods us to consider what this fuller portrait of a categorically transgressive figure reveals about the state of social justice today ... While Hansberry’s family lived comfortably...she quickly learned, as a child, that her relative prominence was no armor against a racist world ... Jim Crow threatened all black Americans, class or any other scraping of privilege be damned, profoundly shaped Hansberry’s broad black consciousness. Years later, at a rally in 1963, she declared that \'between the Negro intelligentsia, the Negro middle class, and the Negro this-and-that—we are one people. … As far as we are concerned, we are represented by the Negroes in the streets of Birmingham!\' ... In fitting herself into Hansberry’s story with autobiographical elements, Perry offers a bracing air of familiarity and urgency around the artist, whose legacy has faded since her death from cancer in 1965. By crisscrossing then and now, Perry insists how important it is that our connection to this history—to Hansberry—survive.
