RaveThe Guardian (UK)A powerful new book from the author of White Fragility reveals why profound racism is often found in supposedly liberal spaces ... Citing deeply revealing and recurring anecdotes from her career as an anti-racist educator, DiAngelo analyses how white Americans who deem themselves inoculated against racism uniquely embody racist practices, including herself ... DiAngelo pertinently distinguishes anti-racist strategies from the valued currency of white friendliness ... Highly instructional, with pertinent questions for white readers who consider themselves sufficiently \'woke\' or have felt \'attacked\' in discussions around race, Nice Racism interrogates the machinery of white progressiveness and how these gears actually work ... Most potent though is DiAngelo’s urgency to get the reader to consider whiteness: its illusions, promises, assumptions and casual narratives of self-importance.
Jenny Offill
RaveThe AtlanticOffill’s work is a story about marital infidelity, but it keenly avoids the melodramatic conventions of fictionalized cheating, as Offill’s work operates on such a quiet landscape of marriage—of the simple day to day ... stories many of us instinctively know, but it’s the innermost details of this particular life, this particular marriage, the smart humor of this wife that revitalizes two otherwise exhausted storylines. Offill moves quickly and poetically over deeply introspective questions about long-term partnerships, parenthood, and aging, weaving the daily banality of an Internet meme into the implosion of a marriage ... Unlike more sensationalized portrayals of infidelity and its chaos, Offill’s characters aren’t pretty when they cry ... From deep within the interiors of a fictional marriage, Offill has crafted an account of matrimony and motherhood that breaks free of the all-too-limiting traditional stories of wives and mothers. There is complexity to the central partnership; Offill folds cynicism into genuine moments of love. It may be difficult to truly know what happens between two people, but Offill gets alarmingly close.
