RaveThe Washington PostThe genius of Night Flyer is interdisciplinary. Along with maps showing Tubman’s routes from slavery to freedom, it adds poetry, historical visual representations, and historical and contemporary photographs, exceeding the archival photographic portraits of Tubman in youth and maturity that one would expect to find in a conventional biography ... A triumph of Black women’s studies, a powerful representation of what Black studies — an interdisciplinary field ranging far wider than history alone — can offer our understanding of the past. Read it to learn about Tubman. Read it to see what Black women’s studies can do.
Toni Morrison, foreword by Ta-Nehisi Coates
PositiveThe New RepublicMorrison anchors her discussion of these complexities in her personal experience ... The Origin of Others combines Toni Morrison’s accustomed eloquence with meaning for our times as citizens of the world. But the breadth of her humanist imagination emerges most gloriously from her magnificent fiction, in which women play leading roles, in which social and racial identities influence but never determine individual character; her novels guide our understanding of how both race and gender inflect experience without diminishing psychological uniqueness. Although her lectures and the race-centered tradition of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates are crucial to understanding her thought, they cannot contain her extraordinary vision of human Othering and belonging.
Henry Louis Gates
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"... an indispensable guide to the making of our times ... For in our current politics we recognize African-American history — the spot under our country’s rug where the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept. Stony the Road lifts the rug ... As essential history for our times, Stony the Road does a kind of cultural work that is only now becoming widespread in the United States but that Germans have been undertaking for decades. The German word for this effort is Vergangenheitsbewältigung — coming to terms with the past — and it carries connotations of a painful history that citizens would rather not confront but that must be confronted in order not to be repeated. Vergangenheitsbewältigung is essential for understanding the American past as a whole.\
