RaveThe Wall Street JournalAn American Odyssey ’is the first full-dress biography of Romare Bearden (1911 - 88), the African-American artist whose meticulously constructed collages and photomontages startled audiences in the 1960s and continue to dazzle and inspire ... An American Odyssey is a valuable history of Bearden’s artistic development and his relationship with the art world. The 24 pages of color plates and the many black-and-white images sprinkled throughout the text are well chosen, and a pioneering bibliography of Bearden’s published writings, as well as welcome facsimiles of some of his handwritten letters to the author, round out this worthy study. Ms. Campbell’s book will be of interest to those just discovering Bearden as well as to experts, along with anyone interested in the history of American art in the mid-to-late 20th century. It is an admirable gesture of friendship from author to subject, one which, in its most closely observed pages, does justice to a remarkable life.
Percival Everett
PositiveThe Nation\"Everett’s new novel, So Much Blue, has dashes of his signature quirky comedy, but it’s not one of his roaring, monster-truck satires … More than the story of a man and his family, though, So Much Blue is an extended meditation on seeing. Pace is an abstract painter who is also African-American, and in that way, the novel could not be timelier … It might be helpful to visualize the structure of So Much Blue as a painting. Containing 17 chapters set in 1979, 15 in 1999, and 22 in 2009—all jumbled together—the novel works like a shattered triptych, or perhaps like an elaborate game of three-card monte, with secrets revealed every so often. The technique is effective, and the rhythm that develops keeps the pages turning. \
