Details
Synopsis
This study of the lingering, but changing, issue of race in America explores how people have been identified or have identified themselves--very often around color--and what that means today.
| Size | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 18.4 oz |
Industry Reviews
"Malcomson not only crosses but audaciously attempts to erase the border between insider and outsider perspectives on race. Few white intellectuals have gone this far....[He] has set a new standard of open, honest dialogue on race in America...."
Patterson
"[D]ensely written and witty....[A] welcome addition to a new body of work on race and whiteness...."
Neal
Because his own viscera are entwined in the story, Malcomson's accounts of how whites' myths of racial belonging were woven....are moral without moralizing, intimate without self-pity or self-importance and only occasionally, forgivably self-indulgent. He spares us the all-too-familiar ceremonies of willful innocence and remorseful hand-wringing that media moralists and academic ideologues recycle to simulate redemption. He writes learnedly but not academically, like Emerson's American Scholar ("Man Thinking"), and as a pilgrim who keeps the faith without imposing a doctrine, weaving threads of historical narrative, reportage, personal experience and cultural speculation into a tapestry of the national obsession with race whose vividness is both jarring and liberating....The result is a book almost biblical...."
Sleeper
"[Malcomson] ranges widely over places and through time to explore the causes and consequences of our national obsession with race. If the structure of the book is meant to evoke the confusion inherent in much "racial thinking," then it succeeds brilliantly....The result is a richly provocative, if messy, examination of the idea of race and the "varied thoughts" that have sustained it."
Jones
"As a writer, [Malcomson is] energetic, impetuous, an headstrong, with a rather pronounced tendency to dash this way and that....Nonetheless, when Mr. Malcomson does rein in his bucking, kicking narrative,...he is excellent....Even when trodding well-trodden historical ground...he manages to find characters and angles that seem fresh....The upside of Scott Malcomson's omnivorous reading is that he often dredges up remarkable quotations from nearly forgotten sources."
New York Review of Books - Larry McMurtry (03/08/2001)
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