I expected to love this book, because I loved Fowler’s previous novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and this is historical fiction about a critical time in America. There’s no question the Booths are a fascinating family, and I enjoyed learning so much about them. But I found this book a slow and fairly…
Mediocre is a book about racism and sexism in America, and like Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race, it’s written in an accessible, personal manner. This one is more a discussion of U.S. history, similar to Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, though I found the book most powerful when she was talking about her own…
This summer I read several powerful books about race that I’d encourage everyone to read, particularly if you’re interested in U.S. history and racism. In my last post, I wrote about Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. After Caste, I read Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove, a Pulitzer Prize winner that describes racism and the justice…
This summer I read two powerful books about race that I’d encourage everyone to read, particularly those interested in U.S. history and racial issues. This is a discussion of the first of those two books. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson, is a book you’ve probably already heard much about. I found it…
If you’re like me, the first time you knew anything about the 1921 Tulsa race riots – or race massacre – was this summer, when Trump scheduled a rally in Tulsa on June 19 (Juneteenth). Before that I was mostly unaware of this history. What happened in Tulsa is a perfect example of the way our…
I started reading this book a few months ago, and then decided I needed to wait until I was in the right frame of mind. This is a tough read that will take you right back to September 11, 2001. It’s a vast collection of eyewitness accounts of what people experienced that day in New…
This was a difficult book to review, because it’s 1) about slavery, which is hard to talk about; and 2) it won the Pulitzer Prize. So I’m a bit intimidated, but I’ll give you my thoughts. The novel begins on a slave plantation in Georgia, in the early 1800’s. Cora is a young woman whose…
The Book Stop 