This Is My America by Kim Johnson This Is My America reminds me of if you crossed The Heartbeats of Wing Jones with The Hate U Give with Just Mercy. At the center of the story are two murder mysteries. While seventeen-year-old Tracy Beaumont is consumed by getting Innocence X (clearly a stand-in for The Innocence Project) to take up the appeal … Continue reading
Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph Servant of God Dorothy Day is a difficult figure to pin down, both in Catholic culture and in American history more generally. Raised a-religious in a working-class family, as a young woman, she ran with a hard-partying group of writers and had … Continue reading
Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman Although the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) got a boost in popularity when they promised President-elect Trump that they would “see him in court” if he tried to enact campaign promises that contradicted the Bill … Continue reading
A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage by Christina Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder We are less than two months away from the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States.* I’ve been doing a lot of reading about suffrage history this year. So far, I have most enjoyed Why They Marched and The Woman’s … Continue reading
The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature by Viv Groskop. When I was in high school and still a literary snob, I went through a big Russian literature phase. I read Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Nabokov like that was a perfectly normal thing for a 16-year-old to do for fun. I still remember Crime … Continue reading
In a previous blog, I provided some discussion questions for Dear Martin by Nic Stone. This September, a sequel/companion novel is set to come out called Dear Justyce. In this book, Justyce’s classmate, Quan, writes letters to him from jail. Justyce gave the notebook of letters he wrote to Martin Luther King, Jr. to Quan and Quan reads … Continue reading
{I first published this list in December 2014, after the grand jury decisions in the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. I’m revisiting it today as there are riots across the country after a string of events including the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN. So much has happened in between and yet … Continue reading
When I was sent to lockdown over two months ago, I was fortunate enough to have an enormous stack of books from the public library. I got a few notes on Instagram about how lucky I was, but, really, I am just a literary glutton. It is not uncommon for me to have over a … Continue reading
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix is the latest from the author who brought us Horrorstor and My Best Friend’s Exorcism. I enjoyed those two, silly though they were, so I was excited to get an advanced copy of this latest horror-comedy novel. The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires takes place in the … Continue reading
Why They Marched: The Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote by Susan Ware is a great read for this year, as the 100th anniversary of U.S. women’s suffrage comes up this August. I Ware does not treat the American suffrage movement as a monolithic, unified group of women, as … Continue reading
Ph.D.s and Pigtails 