MixedThe Guardian (UK)For all his painstaking journalistic rigor, the resulting book is hardly academic or tedious. Dawidoff puts the reader at the scene with vivid prose and attention to detail. Not unlike Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, this is a book as gripping and fast-paced as a bestselling fictional mystery ... Some are certain to welcome the author’s strategic editing of names and lack of illustrations, moves which contribute to the mythic vibe. Some may even feel it helps to elevate this work into a more identifiable, universal and cautionary tale. However, to me, such omissions, though well-intentioned, are the chief flaw of The Other Side of Prospect ... the author is at his best examining Johnson. His depiction of alienation greater even than the ghetto’s is probably as true a slice of prison life as you’ll ever read ... Painting Bobby Johnson’s portrait with just words, with missing facts and without photographs or an index, also detracts from agency. It’s all a diminution of his individuality, even his humanity. But it is not enough to recommend avoiding this fine work. Such are its merits, it seems sure to become the basis of a film, which will lend this story even more immediacy.
Philip Dray
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)... covers only 261 pages but is a sprawling book nonetheless ... If, as Dray suggests, the outrage at Port Jervis helped spark the anti-lynching crusade of leaders like Ida B Wells or T Thomas Fortune, it failed, and fails still, to occasion anything close to the \'reckoning\' cited in his subtitle ... For enlarging our understanding of America’s enduring enthrallment with the violence, guns and control of white supremacy, A Lynching at Port Jervis is superlative ... Am I wrong to find Dray’s account of such developments unsatisfying, for its lack of answers? Perhaps there is no answer to race hate, except for the one prescribed by A Lynching at Port Jervis. Investigate, reflect and resolve.
Ben Raines
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)... perceptive ... This story from long ago puts into context what the new spate of lawlessness in the US is all about. Raines tells a tale of racism and greed. Anyone who imagines that attempting to circumvent democracy is a new thing has forgotten the civil war ... For many, one suspects, the most enlightening part of this sad saga occurs at the start. Some who have heard of the direct involvement of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade have suspected apologists’ propaganda. True, as with today’s drug trade, without a lucrative market among Arabs, Europeans and Americans, slavery would have collapsed much sooner. But there is no exaggerating the extent to which the rulers of Dahomey were involved in capturing fellow Africans for both enslavement and sacrifice. Its victims are estimated in the hundreds of thousands.
Clint Smith
MixedThe Guardian (UK)... an intrepid trek covering lots of ground ... This is an elegiac discourse, sometimes a trifle overwrought. No matter. It answers the title’s question with often elegant emphasis ... Conversely, in New York his explorations inspire disappointment. He begins at the African Burial Ground, which segregated blacks outside the city walls starting in the 18th century ... Smith’s visit to the site of Seneca Village, once a rustic Manhattan hamlet of 225 residents, 150 of African descent, is of more ambiguous merit. In 1860, 10 of those blacks owned their houses and so could vote: 10 of approximately 12,000 black New Yorkers, out of 813,669 inhabitants in total. Was it worth it to lose Seneca Village and gain Central Park? Even knowing that some of those 10 black men were compensated at a rate below the true value of their property, I think so. More troubling by far is gentrification and displacement today. It has made the Treme, Washington and Harlem, with all the attainment and history each embodies, today’s Seneca Village. These were communities of color far richer than Greenwood’s Black Wall Street. Bloodless, their evisceration is no less thorough than the result of Tulsa’s race massacre. As one knows better through this welcome work, that is how the word is passed.
Scott Ellsworth
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... a much-needed book that acts like a mirror. Though documenting a particular place and time, it helps us understand the race-based and sectarian turmoil that is so pervasive today ... Fast-paced but nuanced, it’s an impeccably researched update of Ellsworth’s literary debut.
Don Lemon
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... an audacious and improbable book by a remarkable man ... Relatively young, a short 20 years ago, the CNN anchor was almost unknown. How then, without seeming arrogant or pompous, does he place his life and his experience beside the best-known champions from the pantheon of Black freedom fighters? Invoking the zeal and courage of Dr King and Sojourner Truth, portraying even the proscribed accomplishments of Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen in the same light of heroic survival, his is a voice as essential for our time as Ta-Nehisi Coates and as compelling as Caroline Randall Williams ... Affectingly, he appeals to a growing fanbase by relating that success notwithstanding, his was a life as troubled as their own ... Ending, Lemon muses of how he and Tim speak of race, sometimes disagreeing but always finding their way home to the love they share. This gets us back to the book’s beginning. And that’s what makes this slight work so counterintuitive
Eric Cervini
RaveThe Guardian (UK)... falls short of perfection. But not by much ... With spare prose and linear sequencing that recalls James Baldwin, Cervini chronicles this mission, unsuccessful appeal after unsuccessful appeal. He takes the reader on an epic journey ... an epiphanic work. That is due partly to Cervini’s admirable use of a wealth of material ... Testimony from participants in the 1969 Stonewall riots brings that definitive act of gay defiance to life ... Is it due to academic rigor that Cervini fails to mention Hoover’s long-rumored intimacy with his deputy, Clyde Tolson? Perhaps he felt most readers would already be aware of such speculations ... A more significant issue is the book’s end. Reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, it is a summation in the form of an epilogue. Snappily, one learns the resolution of the myriad lives populating The Deviant’s War. But after earlier thoroughness, one yearns for 500 pages more instead ... I did not anticipate that in writing about Frank Kameny’s heroic stand, Cervini could also cover his own, mine and that of all LGBTQ America. Certainly it was hard to imagine, beforehand, a work that grippingly told of the emergence from turmoil of a more perfect union that is now threatened anew ... Cervini’s is a singular accomplishment. It proves one cannot judge a book by its cover, its outward identity. Seeking always to treat others justly, we ought never to do so. Happy Pride!
David Zucchino
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Zucchino illuminates a harrowing historical incident, the Wilmington coup of 1898, that is long forgotten by most. In doing so, he does a lot to explain our own interesting times ... riveting.
