RaveThe AtlanticWright reached for the very core of the human condition in his portrait of growing up destitute in the Deep South during the early 20th century, and then making his way north: abundance everywhere and terrible hunger, tragedy mixed with the quotidian in the most disorienting ways. The experience he evoked might not have been every Black life, but it was indeed a part of Black life ... Now that I’ve read The Man Who Lived Underground—a previously unpublished novel held in the Wright archives, also written in the early 1940s—I’m even more convinced that Wright deserves to be looked at with fresh eyes ... Wright scripts a surreal reencounter with the world as seen through discovered cracks and doors that reveal hidden interiors ... This isn’t the doctrinal Wright, warning us of the disasters that capitalism creates. This is an unmooring Wright, pushing us past the edge of social analysis and into madness ... the novel is also a Protestant work, as much about God as it is about Black people ... In Fred’s odyssey, which leads him back aboveground to confess to the crime he didn’t commit, Wright has him careen from rage at the pervasive burden of guilt to an embrace of it ... Wright deserves sensitive reconsideration, especially now that so many of us have been proved naive in our belief that an honest rendering of Black people might lead to recognition of our existence in the universality of humanity ... Wright tells an old story that still lives ... He finds himself encountering the world, unfiltered by established terms of order, and acquires a tenderness for all people. In the end, his Black existence presents a particular window and a universal predicament—and a reminder: Surrounded by ghastly forces every day, we destroy life with our many idolatries and illusions.
Natasha Trethewey
RaveThe Boston Globe... a luminous and searing work of prose ... soul-stirring ... It is an elliptical journey of beauty and wounding ... At the risk of coming across as a selfish reader, I hasten to add that she provides a model for living with woundedness, making something usable out of the myriad details, some beautiful, others anguished. This is a specific daughter’s memoir, but it is also a daughter’s memoir in a collective sense, a way of braiding together a legacy ... The writing is quiet in the way grief often is ... she refuses melodrama ... Alongside Trethewey we read the files and uncover the evidence of how the tragedy unfolded. In the process, we learn a great deal from mother and daughter’s forbearance and insistence, even when terrorized, upon dignity. Peering into an archive of her mother’s words that were, in life, unavailable to Trethewey, mother and daughter merge. This is not ventriloquism as much as companionship, loyalty, and love across generations. In the end, we stand with Trethewey’s grief, feeling it as friends rather than voyeurs. That is perhaps what makes this book both so timely and timeless.
Manning Marable
RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle... although the conflict over the content has probably driven sales and attention to the book, the brilliance of this biography has little if anything to do with its apparently shocking revelations. Marable has crafted an extraordinary portrait of a man and his time. Malcolm moves through the social and intellectual history of mid-20th century black America, and his periods of growth and stagnation mirror the tides of black life ... Marable gives us the long view of black politics devoted to a belief in a linked fate for black people across the diaspora, laying the foundation for the Pan-Africanist philosophy Malcolm would embrace at the end of his life ... Although recounting the details of a subject\'s death is the biographer\'s responsibility, the conclusion of Marable\'s book is less powerful than the whole. It moves from illuminating to speculative, from epic to mystery, and then finally to a somewhat more academic-sounding assessment of Malcolm\'s legacy. Notwithstanding this departure from the richly woven prose of the main parts of the text, the book is a masterpiece of meticulous detail and powerful social history ... Ultimately, the Malcolm that Marable offers us serves an important purpose for the 21st century.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
MixedThe San Francisco Chronicle\"As I read his new book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, I kept racking my brain, trying to figure out who was the ‘we’ who was in power for eight years. I had read enough Coates to know he didn’t believe Barack Obama’s presidency meant black power, notwithstanding the essay he wrote likening Barack Obama to Malcolm X. And it was hard to imagine his ‘we’ referred to Democrats or liberals … While Toni Morrison’s speculative tongue-in-cheek assertion that Bill Clinton was the first black president was an engaging shock to the racial imagination, Coates’ riff on that, that Trump is the first white president, lets history off the hook … The book is like an album of standards, or better yet a series of remixes.\
John Edgar Wideman
PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleWideman unself-consciously intersperses classical traditions with black English. The visual landscape of black American life is also finely wrought, from glistening limbs and Bermuda shorts to the oversize cars of the ’50s and the machinery of the Argo corn company where Mamie Till labored ... Wideman is a master of quiet meditation, a sort that can turn into brooding at the most pointed moments ... For Wideman to write to save a life is to preserve a history that is not up for debate, a long looming story we know to be true.
ed. Jesmyn Ward
RaveThe San Francisco Chronicle...we might call this an all-star team of black American writing. And while each possesses a distinctive voice, all of the pieces pulse in rhythm with undercurrents of grief as well as hope ... Ward has placed the pieces together brilliantly. This is no random assortment of writings. It’s is a composition made by someone who is as careful a reader as she is a writer. Ward is attuned to the spirit of this moment and she is its conductor, gifting insight to us all ... both timely and potentially timeless.
