Search Results: AC

Although Mosley’s fiction falls into a category that many consider subliterary—detective fiction—his depth of character, researched historical details, and realistic dialogue transcend the cliches of the genre.

Clifton’s writing is steeped in the rich oral tradition of the griot—the African storyteller. Through verse Clifton has scrutinized the American dream through the eyes of its most powerless and neglected citizens: women, minorities and children.

By exploring his own experiences as a second-generation Korean-born American, Lee’s novels portray the tensions between assimilation into a society and alienation from oneself and one’s heritage. 

Gaines was never exposed to black writers, and so his literary models were such white American writers as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, and European writers such as Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. He decided early, however, to focus his own writing on what he knew—which meant portraying African American culture and language.

Lewis marched with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in an effort to secure voting rights for African Americans. During the march, a confrontation with police occurred, and Lewis was one of many marchers beaten in what became known as Bloody Sunday.

For Franklin, the task of correcting American history in the light of black experience had always been a crucial part of the fight for racial equality.

Raised in rural New Hampshire, Banks initially planned to follow his father into the plumbing business; where he grew up, he told an interviewer, ‘the idea of being a writer was like the idea of being a butterfly.’

The narrative improvises upon the oral tradition of talk-story, a form of storytelling that encouraged Hong Kingston’s aspirations to become a strong, self-articulate woman.

I learned that photography would enable me to show what was right and wrong about America, the world and life.

Persuaded that the enormity of a bygone injustice has been only partially perceived, I have taken upon myself the task of piecing together what might be called the ‘forgotten’ or ignored parts of the tapestry of those years.

Richard Kluger provides the fullest possible view of the human and legal drama in the years before 1954, the cumulative assaults on the white power structure that defended segregation, and the step-by-step establishment of a team of inspired black lawyers that could successfully challenge the law.

Paramount in his analysis is the importance of Islam, the principal Middle Eastern religion, and how it has helped mould the character and proclivities of the ‘elusive, self-contradictory Arab mentality.’

Dawidowicz allows the coolly accumulated weight of detail—the growing force of the Nazi’s anti-Semitic juggernaut, the evolution of the camps as places of scientific murder, the efforts by the victims to hold onto fragments of normal life—to create its emotional and intellectual impact.

The book is encyclopedic in scope and is sure to provide the definitive account, tracing the development of Aryan mythology in European history.

This is a necessary transcendence of many other historians’ dehumanizing view of both slaves and slaveholders, and to it Genovese brings his intellectual expansiveness and depth of feeling.

He presents himself as an ardent critic of theories that contend that African Americans are subservient to white social infrastructures. Murray views African American culture as an advantageous extension of the American self.

Sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly having communicated French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, Dreyfus was sent to the penal colony at Devil’s Island in French Guiana and placed in solitary confinement.

While executing his first lawyering job as an Advocate at the Cape Town Bar, Sachs came to see laws as tools ‘to oppress people, not to protect people.’

A profound and thorough interpretation of Wright’s work. It is at once affective and human, very moving and complete. Michel Fabre understands both the man and the writer.

The story of life lived on both sides of the color line, McBride’s memoir gives equal space to the voice of his white mother […] and his own questions about navigating black identity as a mixed-race person.