How to be a Credit to Your Race
In Margo Jefferson’s Negroland: A Memoir, a personal and historical account of upper middle-class black family life in 1950s and 1960s Chicago, the colorline is something that must be learned.
Reviews
The Missouri Breaks
Greenspan's biography provides early 21st-century readers with a thick description of the social, political and cultural climate of the disparate but intimately connected contexts of Brown's life. More than a time-line, Greenspan's contextualization calls attention to the cataclysmic events taking place in the world of the renowned abolitionist and writer.
Southern Comic Valentine
There was something about Mayberry that evoked a kind of Southern nowhere-ness. It was the not the New South of Henry Grady, not the romanticized South of a natural and benign unequal social order like Thomas Nelson page’s. How could Mayberry be that when it had, amazingly, no black people?
Post-Nostalgia Poster Child?
If Pokey LaFarge is post-nostalgic, it is only partway. If anything, his music and personae expose the extent to which older, simpler virtues—for worse and for better—survive in St. Louis in so many ways.
Tourist Street With a Backbeat
Bourbon Street: A History takes a single street as its focus to reveal the multiple overlaps and interrelations of different cultures and different histories. This method has its costs, at times exchanging topical breadth for depth.
Ten Easy Pieces
Marcus’s chosen form, media's coveted "listicle," is of the moment. But, at first glance, his subject matter is not. Who even talks about “rock ’n’ roll” anymore?
Last American Maestro
The facts of Bernstein’s story—the scope of his talents, the velocity of his ascent—still amaze. His natural gifts were embarrassingly rich: ferociously intelligent, musical, and social in equal measures. But Bernstein was also lucky—in the right place at the right time again and again and again.
“Just As I Am”
While Graham retained authority over the use of his voice, it is unclear how much control he exercised. Graham’s appeal seems closer to that of a capable politician than a shrewd marketer in that his greatest coup was getting people from strikingly different walks of life to believe that he both represented their views and could serve as their moral guide.
“Other Things To Hide”
Hughes gives us a pleasantly dense tale of the shadows in Richard Nixon’s mind that might have been there even without the Chennault Affair—assuming he would have been elected without the Chennault machinations. We can never know if it determined the election outcome, but one major consequence of the Affair that we do know was Watergate.