When family and friends started raving about Percival Everett’s James, I decided it was time to revisit Twain’s original text before exploring Everett’s take on this American classic. I’ve only read it once before, and it was so many years ago that I only remembered the very basics of the story. After traveling down the Mississippi again, […]
Summary: Coleman Hughes’s The End of Race Politics is a double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun of a book. Its modest page-count shortens both barrels, but they still pack a punch at close range. The shell in the first barrel contains arguments in favor of Hughes’s “colorblind principle,” which impels us to “treat people without regard to race, both in […]
2022 Update: Just shy of ten years since I first read it, No Country for Old Men is every bit as grim as I remember, and then some. One thing shifted for me on my second reading: I used to think of this book as an ultra-gritty crime story, but this time around, it felt more like […]
Greetings, dear friends of the present and curious citizens of the future. When I got vaccinated back in the spring, I thought I was done with the COVID-19 pandemic, at least personally. Well, as it turns out, the pandemic wasn’t done with me! The vaccines, we were told, were our ticket out of the months […]
I have spent the last two months going through the approval process to volunteer at my local hospice center. As a supplement to the excellent training I’ve received, I thought Atul Gawande‘s Being Mortal would be a useful companion as I learn to support dying people and their loved ones. As a surgeon, public health expert, and accomplished […]
“The past has always interested me for use in the present.” So wrote the aging Harry S. Truman in a 1954 letter to Dean Acheson, his former Secretary of State and dear friend. This observation is reason enough to investigate Truman’s life, a life that still echoes in our modern age. But the reason I picked […]
Back in 2018, I read Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Here’s my favorite passage from that excellent book: The common experience of oppression and exploitation creates the potential for a united struggle to better the conditions of all…Political unity, including winning white workers to the centrality of racism in shaping the lived experiences of Black […]
As the son of two parents with postgraduate degrees, the purpose and value of education were central to my upbringing. My folks never pushed me, but they always encouraged my intellectual growth and facilitated my desire to attend college with eager ease. I always knew I was lucky (they wouldn’t let me forget it), but […]
I have very little to say about Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It is an absolute masterpiece. The writing, the characters, the story––they’re all superb and blend together perfectly. The book is bursting with poignant insights about the nature of freedom, suffering, racism, family, memory, trauma, healing, humanism, and much more. It’s also terrifying and punishing, so be […]
Sula is the first Toni Morrison novel I’ve read, but I’m certain it won’t be the last. This captivating tale of two Black girls growing up in Bottom––a hilly, early-20th-century Ohio town––left me with no questions whatsoever about why Morrison is a core member of the American literary canon. Though her characters and story are plenty […]