I’ve beensitting on this review for a couple of weeks, struggling to know what to write. The book won the Man Booker prize, which often means a challenging read. After reading the book I watched an interview of Beatty to get a sense of what he was like. He was charming, yet deflecting. I read another interview and found that he truly focuses on the craft of writing. He’s not prolific. But the attention to every word is evident in The Sellout. The book begins […]
Race with a Capital R
In the last blog post, I mentioned I had a hard time finding a followup to 2 really good books I read last month. After rejecting ever book in my library TBR pile, I started rummaging through the multiple TBR piles around my house. (Tell me I am not alone in that!) In stack #2, I found a copy of a book recommended to me by a student a few years ago for consideration for summer reading. I never got around to reading it because […]
MLK: The Original Shade Thrower
Yesterday afternoon, I read Frank Bruni’s opinion piece, titled “The Wrong Way to Take On Trump.” Bruni – former political reporter turned restaurant critic turned opinion columnist for the New York Times – decided to school the American public on how we should “go high” when talking, protesting, and generally reacting to Trump. Except he didn’t really give specifics on what to do, nor did he interview any activists on their advice. Bruni spent the majority of this column telling us how we failed in […]
That time a Sheriff tried to lynch Thurgood Marshall
In 1949, a 17-year old white woman didn’t come home one night. The next day, she and her husband said she had been raped by four black men. Two of the men had helped the couple when they were stranded in their car. Two more were nowhere near the scene of the alleged crime-one was being arrested miles away. But that didn’t matter. The accusation of black hands sullying white maidenhood was enough to whip white Southerners in a frenzy. Only three of the accused […]