Best for: People interested in great writing on race, especially writing that gives perspective on race that isn’t US-centric. In a nutshell: Ms. Eddo-Lodge explores the history of racism in Britain and looks at ways to address it today. Line that sticks with me: “Being in a position where their lives are so comfortable that they don’t really have anything material to oppose, faux ‘free speech’ defenders spend all their spare time railing against ‘offense culture.’” (p133) Why I chose it: I follow Ms. Eddo-Lodge […]
A debut that deserves all the praise it’s been given.
I have been trying to figure out what I want to say about this book for literally months now, and I just can’t do it. I give up. The amount of things I want to say are all swirling around in my brain and getting mixed up with each other, and everything is coming out all garbled whenever I try, so I give up and am now officially half-assing this review in a stream of consciousness manner with no regards for structure, and I am no longer […]
Jodi Picoult’s racism book . . . I have thoughts.
I’ve decided not to rate this book because my thoughts are so conflicted about it, but I do want to say some things. This is a book about a black nurse being prohibited from treating the newborn son of a white supremacist, and when the baby dies, he accuses her of murdering his son. I’ve never read a Jodi Picoult book before, because her books have always seemed like they were Issue Books, designed to be manipulative in a way that emphasizes the subject matter […]
Connecting Across Continents and Time
Best for: Anyone interested in fighting back. In a nutshell: A mixture of interviews and speech transcripts that seeks to connect struggles for freedom across the world. Line that sticks with me: “But those protest movements would not have been necessary – it would not have been necessary to create a mid-century Black freedom movement had slavery been comprehensively abolished in the nineteenth century.” Why I Chose It: I decided to kick off participation in my fifth Cannonball Read with this book because I am […]