RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)An extensive declaration of selfhood ... Black and Female charts the journey from absence to presence. It is a portrait of the birth of consciousness, a process that has taken vigilance, determination and language.
Bernardine Evaristo
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Part coming-of-age story and part how-to manual, the book is, above all, one of the most down-to-earth and least self-aggrandizing works of self-reflection you could hope to read. Evaristo’s guilelessness is refreshing, even unsettling ... With ribald humour and admirable candour, Evaristo takes us on a tour of her sexual history ... Characterized by the resilience of its author, it is replete with stories about the communities and connections Evaristo has cultivated over forty years ... Invigoratingly disruptive as an artist, Evaristo is a bridge-builder as a human being.
Isabel Wilkerson
RaveThe Oprah Magazine...magnificent ... Wilkerson deepens and extends her examination of the inception and consequences of American racism ... Weaving in and out of past and present, Wilkerson provides the kind of history lesson that gives rise to countless aha moments ... Caste offers a forward-facing vision. Bursting with insight and love, this book may well help save us.
Thomas Chatterton Williams
MixedHarper\'s... a fluent, captivating, if often disquieting story ... There are many openly felt and beautifully rendered moments in Self-Portrait that become frustrating when one considers them closely ... Black writers announcing their freedom from the designs of others is an old and important rite of passage. But freedom that must be announced is freedom that must be invented, something crafted as opposed to organic. Ultimately freedom is, like race, something conceived and then practiced. The question of what it means to be free is no simpler than the question of what it means to be black ... we witness Williams on a journey of both self-discovery and self-creation, and his memoir is most valuable as a way deeper into, as opposed to a way out of, race talk ... ultimately Williams commits the same crime for which he has often indicted Coates—reducing blackness to suffering...If this is all Williams imagines blackness to be, no wonder he wants to reject it ... Self-Portrait is at its most exciting and satisfying when it reveals what a distinctly black story it tells. And ultimately, Williams’s race refusal is only a story, amounting to nothing more than a discursive rebellion. It’s as if he has no skin in the game ... I wish there were something truly at stake to give Williams’s pronouncement more dramatic heft. I wanted to see how far he was willing to take it, what price he would be willing to pay. But Self-Portrait is hardly a how-to book ... In the end, this book about race is no more or less than a story about being a parent, a narrative portrait of a father’s attempt to discover a language that would connect his identity with that of his daughter, who does not look like him. So, finally, Williams’s turning away from race is just a parent’s primal impulse to turn toward his child.
Adrienne Brodeur
RaveOprah MagazineThough her mother could make for an easy target, Brodeur never resorts to simplistic judgments, even when describing the multiple ways in which Malabar’s devotion to her paramour exceeded her commitment to her daughter. Brodeur is a deft memoirist, portraying Malabar as a woman traumatized by a violent parent and early tragedy. In this stunning tale of treachery—unsettling yet seductive—we are led through some of the darkest and most alluring corridors of the human heart.
Toni Morrison
PositiveOprah Magazine...both dazzlingly heady and deeply personal ... The Source of Self-Regard is also about remembrance—a finely calibrated congregation of memorials ... The Source of Self-Regard excavates Morrison’s vast well of knowledge. Open its pages and receive.
Imani Perry
RaveBook PostIn tender, elegant prose, Perry establishes her literary mission, which is to honor the ambition of the late Lorraine Hansberry ... Looking for Lorraine is a refreshing and unusual life study that gives readers insight into the challenges, temptations, and limitations inherent in biography itself ... The writer risks flattening out nuances, or imposing order or logic where it doesn’t exist, for the sake of narrative coherence. Perry avoids the pitfalls by allowing Hansberry her contradictions, and leaving some mysteries intact ... Perry introduces us to Hansberry’s rich interior world ... It is Perry’s own vision that ultimately makes Looking for Lorraine an evocative and resounding experience.
