Kindred is a first-person narrative of a woman, Dana, and her husband, Kevin, being pulled back in time to save the life of her ancestor, Rufus, who seems perpetually prone to disaster. The catch is that she’s African American and Rufus is white, and lives in Antebellum Maryland. I loved this book so hard. The germ of this book occurred to Octavia Butler after she heard the anger of a young black consciousness activist targeting the subservience in older generations towards oppressive white culture. Paired […]
Is there light at the end of the tunnel?
Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is sitting atop the NYT bestsellers chart and is an Oprah pick. It is an amazing novel about race, injustice and the American way. The story of a slave named Cora’s quest for freedom from slavery is also the story of America’s racism throughout history. Whitehead imagines a mid-nineteenth century America where the Underground Railroad was an actual physical railroad existing beneath the earth. As Cora’s first station master says, If you want to see what this nation is all […]
Recommended Reading
I think a lot of the books I choose to read I choose because they look important and/or like they’re going to be good for me and/or because I ought to. Books by Doris Lessing and Gloria Steinem come to mind by way of example of this. And I usually end up enjoying these books and feeling glad that I read them. Still, they might not be the kind of books that I would recommend to everybody I know. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is a […]
If You Want to See How Evil People Can Be…Read This Book!
Rating: 4.0/5 Summary: Amari is a young black girl from a village in Africa. She has an easy life with her parents, younger brother and newly betrothed- Besa. It all changes when one day an Ashanti warrior brings “strange men with skin the color of goat’s milk”. Most of the people in the village are killed, while the young and healthy survivors are captured and taken to be slaves in America. This book follows Amari’s journey to the coast, to America and in slavery. She […]
In a room with Jefferson, Wilson, Truman, and Ike, but generally mistaken for a waiter.
The first I remember hearing about James K. Polk was in my high school US history class. He was described as the greatest president you’ve never heard of, and probably the only president to achieve every goal he set for his administration. Now, I don’t typically speak very highly of my high school history classes (the teacher was given a relatively small canvas on which to paint the picture of history, and he painted with the broadest of brushes), but in this one instance, at […]
A Cather novel about the Antebellum South.
I’m now working my way through Willa Cather’s less famous novels, and I have to say, I’m disappointed the ones I’ve been reading are less famous than they could be. The Song of the Lark, O Pioneers!, and Death Comes for the Archbishop are all very deservedly famous, but after reading Sapphira and the Slave Girl, I hope that more of her works can receive greater prominence. She’s an excellent writer and she takes her readers to a bunch of backgrounds throughout the course of North American […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- Next Page »