PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAffecting ... In LaBrie’s hands this grim and messy story feels both urgent and imaginative. Though she sometimes writes with the flattened tone of someone trying desperately to sound OK while beating back demons, this effect is overshadowed by her sharp observations of worlds she feels excluded from ... Makes for an engrossing read, its hectic scenes held together by a psychically unmoored narrator whose wit and honesty make us trust her anyway.
Kellie Carter Jackson
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe book is most effective in unearthing the stories of little-known, everyday rebellions, especially from the lives of Black women ... Her book is not an instruction manual for activists. But she does suggest that every era gets the protest movement it needs and deserves. History — complicated, cleareyed and unrepentant — is her warning and her weapon of choice.
Antonia Hylton
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewFrom a decade of meticulous research, Hylton pieces together the story of an institution that, at its height, housed some 2,700 people ... Really about the continued lack of understanding, treatment and care of the mental health of a people, Black people, who need it most.
Ricardo Nuila
RaveThe New York Times Book Review[Nuila] humanizes his points in meticulous and compassionate detail through focusing primarily on the stories of five Ben Taub patients. So many medical narratives center on the ugly endgame: very sick people at their worst ... Nuila... instead takes the time to work backward as he describes the plights of people he has cared for.
Helen Rappaport
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... well-researched ... Rappaport leaves no shred of evidence unexamined — her bibliography is 19 pages long with another 47 pages of notes — which allows her to shade the contours of Seacole’s history with facts, details and color. And her work pays off; the Crimean section of In Search of Mary Seacole is the book’s beating heart ... Most interesting is Rappaport’s exploration of the relationship between Seacole and Nightingale ... a comprehensive and much-deserved tribute to an incredible life. Still, the author spends too much time fact-checking The Wonderful Adventures, labeling the memoir a brilliant piece of public relations and a self-promotional travelogue, full of gaps, puzzles, faux-modest evasions and glaring omissions. And at some point Rappaport’s exhaustive research turns exhausting — even to the author.
Dawn Turner
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... wholehearted ... Turner interrupts the monolithic narrative of Black Chicago as ruined and broken, as well as the one-note stereotypes about growing up in public housing. In their place she offers a textured portrait of a moment in time in a particular place ... In episodic chapters that read like self-contained short stories woven together into a whole, Turner seeks to understand how three Black girls with very similar aspirations ended up with wildly divergent fates ... Turner’s suspension between two worlds provides an ideal vantage for the book. Even when she leaves Bronzeville, she never leaves it behind. Like the poet Gwendolyn Brooks and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, she is a native daughter of Black Chicago with a bone-deep knowledge of the place and its people. Rather than judge her friend and sister for their choices, she holds fast to her through line: \'There but for the grace of God go I\' ... Recalling their youth, Turner describes the girls’ unchaperoned roaming through the asphalt landscape with attentive detail, hitting all the familiar touchstones of ’70s Black girlhood.
