An innovative cultural history.
The power of a color.
National Book Award winner Perry offers surprising revelations about the connection between the color blue and Black identity as she explores myth and literature, art and music, folklore and film. “Blues are our sensibility,” she writes. She begins her wide-ranging history with the production of indigo in the 16th century. Coveted throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe, the dye was so valuable that a block of indigo could be traded for an enslaved person. Imported from West Africa to America, the planting and processing of indigo became tasks for the enslaved. Although the work was arduous, the color, Perry notes, “remained a source of pleasure,” and enslaved people used the dye for their own walls, doors, porches, and clothing. The color also became associated with mourning, with blue periwinkles marking the graves of the enslaved and cobalt blue bottles hung from myrtle trees to mark people’s passing. The melancholy sound of “a blued note” infused Black music with a quality “so distinctive that someone who knows nothing about music, formally speaking, can hear it is special.” Miles Davis’ albums Blue Period and Kind of Blue, Nina Simone’s Little Girl Blue, Roberta Flack’s Blue Lights in the Basement, Duke Ellington’s composition “Crescendo in Blue,” and Mongo Santamaría’s song “Afro Blue” are among many of Perry’s musical references. Literary references abound as well: Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Ntozake Shange’s novel Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo. The “precocious girl-child Indigo,” Perry writes, “was me.” If blue has signaled Black agency—Haitian rebels wore blue uniforms—it also conveys oppression: “The blue uniform is a metonym for the enforcement arm of the state,” Perry notes, and has become shorthand for police power.
An innovative cultural history.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780062977397
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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