One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race

Posted in Anthropology, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2018-01-22 01:44Z by Steven

One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2000-10-01
544 Pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-0374240790

Scott Malcomson

Why has a nation founded upon precepts of freedom and universal humanity continually produced, through its preoccupation with race, a divided and constrained populace? Scott Malcomson’s search for an answer took him across the country—to the Cherokee Nation, an all-black town, and a white supremacist enclave in Oklahoma—back though the tangled red-white-and-black history of America from colonial times onward, and to his own childhood in racially fractured Oakland, California. By not only recounting our shared tragicomedy of race but helping us to own it—even to embrace it—this important book offers us a way at last to move beyond it.

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The Women

Posted in Books, Media Archive, Novels, Women on 2013-11-21 00:35Z by Steven

The Women

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
1996
160 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780374525293; ISBN10: 0374525293

Hilton Als, Staff Writer
The New Yorker

A New York Times Notable Book

Daring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the lives and work of the writer’s subjects: his mother, a self-described “Negress,” who would not be defined by the limitations of race and gender; the mother of Malcolm X, whose mixed-race background and eventual descent into madness contributed to her son’s misogyny and racism; brilliant, Harvard-educated Dorothy Dean, who rarely identified with other blacks or women, but deeply empathized with white gay men; and the late Owen Dodson, a poet and dramatist who was female-identified and who played an important role in the author’s own social and intellectual formation.

Hilton Als submits both racial and sexual stereotypes to his inimitable scrutiny with relentless humor and sympathy. The results are exhilarating. The Women is that rarest of books: a memorable work of self-investigation that creates a form of all its own.

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