Deeply researched, crisply written ... Williams makes a compelling case that Close Ranks was the product of both calculation and opportunism ... By rendering this story in such rich archival detail, Williams’s book is a fitting coda to Du Bois’s unfinished history of Black Americans and the First World War.
A first-rate intellectual history ... Through dogged research, Williams has illuminated the mystery of the book that could not be written and that haunted its author to the end.
Williams convincingly renders Du Bois as a tragic figure whose optimism was dashed by the intransigence of racism, adding poignancy to a story about the limits and fragility of American democracy. At once a moving character study and a deeply researched look at a dispiriting era from the country’s past, this is history at its most vivid.
The Du Bois that emerges from this illuminating book is fully human. He fails, he dissembles, but he never stops fighting for justice and equality. His insights are as timely today as they were a century ago. In an otherwise thoughtful and nuanced book, the women in Du Bois’ life are less fully fleshed ... Nevertheless, Williams, like Du Bois before him, has done the important work of making sure that history is recorded and remembered.
