Recommendations from our site
“It’s an uncomfortable book to read. It’s one of those books that makes you feel slightly discomfited, but because he is such a beautiful writer, a poet, he does have this lyrical voice. That makes it extremely pleasurable as well, which in itself makes one feel a little bit anxious, getting pleasure from such an uncomfortable subject.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Kathryn Hughes, Literary Scholar
“This is a series of beautifully written essays by a poet. They say in a few words what whole books try to say. The book is a meditation on identity, on belonging, on the pain of not belonging, on the way in which communities are imagined and overlap and don’t overlap with each other. It’s also a study of the impact and nature of violence, especially racial violence. It’s about what’s said and what’s unsaid, when it is possible to talk about race, but not racism, and what the implications of not saying things and saying things are for our understanding. It focuses on the experience of being black in Jamaica, Africa, the US and the UK, and on the particular specificities of being black, but it speaks to everybody’s experience, everybody’s history, in extraordinary, limpid prose.”
The Best Politics Books of 2022, recommended by David Edgerton
