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Recent Reviews
Robert Samuels, Toluse Olorunnipa
Rave The New York Times Book Review It is a testament to the power of His Name Is George Floyd that the book’s most vital moments come not after Floyd’s death, but in its intimate, unvarnished and scrupulous account of his life ... a brilliantly revealing portrait of the structures of poverty, land theft and racism that shaped not only Floyd but also his kinship networks in the South ... does an impressive job of contextualizing Floyd’s struggles with drug addiction, frequent arrests and afive-year prison sentence for aggravated robbery in a crime that he insisted he had nothing to do with. Throughout, we get the portrait of a flawed man trying to come to terms with diminished dreams, one whose muscular physical exterior hid a gentle soul who battled pain, anxiety, claustrophobia and depression ... Samuels and Olorunnipa take pains to offer capsule histories of the structural roots of racism in the criminal justice and education systems — with their impact on wealth and homeownership — to better tell Floyd’s story holistically. This does not always make for a seamless narrative, but in many ways the book is stronger for it ... By focusing on the disparate parts of the system of structural racism that impacted Floyd’s life, the authors allow readers to better comprehend and experience the final indignity that greeted him on May 25, when Chauvin, an officer with a history of brutalizing suspects, casually ended his life.
John Lewis
Rave The Washington Post ... a small, powerful and deeply observed book of ruminations ... Lewis joined the civil rights struggle as a Freedom Rider and endured a brutal beating outside a bus station in Anniston, Ala., on May 14, 1961. His courage, tenacity and humility became hallmarks. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis was the youngest keynote speaker at the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington. Carry On is at its best when Lewis casually discusses the intricacies behind this history, including parts of his speech that were censored by concerned allies who thought his words were too incendiary ... Lewis’s ability to forgive those who physically assaulted him in the 1960s — and in so doing betrayed American democracy — is both awe inspiring and complicates that movement’s legacy in important ways ... Perhaps the most remarkable part of Carry On is the way Lewis deftly converges the emotional with the intellectual, the personal with the political, freedom dreams with pragmatic calls for major policy innovation ... represents a final literary gift to a new generation of activists who have taken the responsibility — one that Lewis never considered a burden — to move America closer to the Beloved Community. Lewis’s political example remains as relevant now as it did in his own time, perhaps more so since — with intersecting crises that touch on the environment, immigration, voting rights and the future of American democracy — we have reached an existential crossroads in the wake of last year’s political and racial reckoning. As he did for his entire life, Lewis, through his words in this volume after his death, offers us sustenance, faith and hope for the battles that lie ahead.
Elizabeth Hinton
Rave The New York Times Book Review ... a groundbreaking, deeply researched and profoundly heart-rending account of the origins of our national crisis of police violence against Black America ... Through 10 crisply written and lucidly analytical chapters, Hinton reframes the conventional understanding of the long hot summers of the 1960s and their aftermath ... In a very real sense, America on Fire chronicles how law enforcement became the nation’s main policy tool both for stemming urban unrest and for stifling Black demands for citizenship and dignity ... One of this book’s many virtues is the way it contextualizes the emergence not just of the Black Lives Matter protests but of our larger contemporary moment ... Hinton’s unstinting examination of this history ultimately leaves one with hope for the future ... more than a brilliant guided tour through our nation’s morally ruinous past. It reveals the deep roots of the current movement to reject a system of law enforcement that defines as the problem the very people who continue to seek to liberate themselves from racial oppression. In undertaking this work, Hinton achieves something rare. She deploys scholarly erudition in the service of policy transformation, propelled by Black voices whose hitherto untold stories of protest add much-needed sustenance to America’s collective imagination.
Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Rave Los Angeles Review of Books ... a pensive, lyrical, and finely wrought portrait ... the most in-depth and personal examination of the forces that shaped his life to date ... His death sent the Little family adrift, a harrowing descent that Payne documents with richly detailed vignettes, culling new dimensions that push back against the hagiography of Alex Haley’s best-selling The Autobiography of Malcolm X ... Payne’s contrasting style elicits great benefits when discussing The Nation of Islam (NOI) in comparison to largely white religious groups, such as Mormons, whose teachings, beliefs, and contradictions were, at the time, more readily accepted than the NOI’s were ... Payne’s biography reaches its peak with an extraordinary chapter detailing Malcolm’s successful efforts to build an NOI mosque in Hartford, Connecticut ... The Dead Are Arising falters in grappling with Malcolm’s political thought and activism. His relationship to Martin Luther King Jr. and the larger Black freedom struggle requires more historical analysis. At times it feels as though the book is galloping toward its conclusion just as readers grow accustomed to the intimate pace that has been set up during its first three quarters ... This biography of Malcolm, revelatory in so many ways, views the icon from the inside out. The Dead Are Arising brilliantly crafts a new origin story of the most important working-class Black leader ever produced. By reinvestigating the story that Malcolm wanted the world to believe and exposing his elisions, mistakes, and contradictions, Les and Tamara Payne have produced an exceedingly valuable and important biography that adds immeasurably to our understanding of Malcolm X.