RaveBookforumMoore displays magnificent self-reflection. He narrates his story in a looping, lyrical style that approaches complicated truths through metaphor ... Framed as a kind of investigation of home, Moore’s memoir traces the history of dispossession and displacement beneath his family’s poverty ... For Moore, these efforts often take the form of an empathy that borders on the transcendent ... No one is safe. No one is presumed neutral or innocent. The author does not presume himself to be ... He refuses to accept a narrative of victimhood—that somehow, in all the mess of it, he emerged blameless and untouched by the rigorous assault on black life.
Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele
RaveBookforumKhan-Cullors’s memoir is gorgeously nonlinear. She tells her story in the voice of the clear-eyed analytical adult, as if responding to the very relevant question 'How did I get here, you ask?' with, 'Well, let me tell you.' Memoir is a tricky genre: It narrates both a particular set of linked occurrences and an ongoingness indicating that similar things have happened across time. By juxtaposing Khan-Cullors’s childhood memories with the activism to which she has devoted her adult life, the memoir gives us the events as well as their social and historical contexts.
