Burn Down Master's House: A Novel - REVIEW

by Clay Cane

As turmoil simmers within a divided nation, smoke from another blaze begins to rise. Sparked by individual acts of resistance among those enslaved across the American South, their seemingly disparate rebellions fuel a singular inferno of justice, connecting them in ways quiet at times, explosive at others. As these flames rise, so will they.

Luke, quick-witted and perceptive, and Henri, a man of strong and defiant spirit, forge an unbreakable bond at a Virginia plantation called Magnolia Row. Both seek escape from unimaginable cruelty. And sure as the fires of hell, Luke and Henri will leave their mark among the lives they touch...

Like Josephine, a young and observant girl who wields silence as her greatest weapon. A witness to Luke and Henri's resilience, she listens, watches, and waits.

Then there's Charity Butler, inspired by a formerly enslaved man who found his freedom fighting alongside Josephine. At his encouragement, Charity rises up for her life and family—only to face a deeply unjust system.

And finally, there is Nathaniel, who ruthlessly exploits other Black people and mirrors the cruelty of the white men who, like him, are enslavers. A perversion of the system of slavery, his rule is both fragile and contradictory.

Burn Down Master's House is a singular tour de force of a novel—breathtaking in scope, compassion, and timeliness that speaks powerfully to our present era.

Clay Cane is an award-winning journalist, writer, radio host, and political analyst. A graduate of Rutgers University-Newark with a degree in African American Studies, his work has been featured in The Washington Post, CNN, and BET. His 2024 book, The Grift: The Downward Spiral of Black Republicans from the Party of Lincoln to the Cult of Trump, became an instant New York Times bestseller. His first book, Live Through This: Surviving the Intersections of Sexuality, God, and Race, was published in 2017. Burn Down Master's House: A Novel is his third book.

Dafina
ISBN-13: 978-1496759146

Forgotten Souls: The Search for the Lost Tuskegee Airmen - REVIEW

by Cheryl W. Thompson

In 1945, World War II ended one of the deadliest conflicts in history. Geared for battle were nearly 1,000 trailblazing Black pilots trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Field, an unrepentantly segregated facility in Alabama. Hailing from the Iowa cornfields to the Texas Gulf Coast to the tobacco plantations of North Carolina, the Tuskegee Airmen already proved, under the toughest circumstances, to be among the most resilient and defiantly patriotic men of the Army Air Corps.

27 of them disappeared during the final critical missions in Europe. So, too, would the government’s efforts to find them or help to bring closure to the loved ones that the valiant 332nd Fighter Group left behind.

In Forgotten Souls, award-winning investigative journalist Cheryl W. Thompson delves into the true stories of the Black combat pilots who faced unimaginable racism—before, during and after the war—from a military that told them they were less than, even as their courage and aviation prowess saved scores of White brothers-in-arms from the enemy and possibly death.

As cruel as war itself could be, the friends, family, communities and fellow Tuskegee Airmen who mourned the lost pilots never imagined how unforgivable it could get. After 80 years, Forgotten Souls honors the impact they made, and the sacrifices they endured on America’s behalf.

Cheryl W. Thompson is an award-winning investigative reporter for National Public Radio, an associate professor of journalism at George Washington University, and author of Forgotten Souls: The Search for the Lost Tuskegee Airmen. She is the recipient of more than 40 journalism awards, including an Emmy and 5 National Headliners, and served as reporting coach for the Pulitzer Prize-winning NPR podcast No Compromise. During more than 20 years as a reporter for The Washington Post, she was part of teams that won two Pulitzer Prizes for national reporting. She served as a Pulitzer Prize juror for the Investigative Reporting category in 2022 and chaired the jury in 2023. She is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., and Investigative Reporters and Editors, where she was elected the first Black president in 2018 and served an unprecedented three terms. She is also a founding and current board member of the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism and a member of the advisory board for the Fund for Investigative Journalism. She is currently a member of the National Press Foundation Board and the Spotlight DC Board, and a two-time graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The daughter of a Tuskegee Airman, she is a Chicago native who lives outside Washington, DC, and can be found online at CherylWThompson.com.

Dafina

ISBN-13: 978-1496750778

The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WWII and Shape Modern America - REVIEW

by Christopher C. Gorham

As Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s special envoy to Europe in World War II she went where the president couldn’t go. She was among the first Allied women to enter a liberated concentration camp, and stood in the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s mountain retreat, days after its capture. Though Anna Rosenberg emerged from modest immigrant beginnings with only a high school education, she was the real power behind national policies critical to America winning the war and prospering afterward. Astonishingly, her story remains largely forgotten.

Rosenberg advanced from a career in public relations in 1920s Manhattan to become FDR’s unofficial adviser, and soon wielded enormous influence—no less potent for being subtle. Roosevelt dubbed her “my Mrs. Fix-It.” Her extraordinary career continued after his death as she fought tirelessly for causes from racial integration to women’s equality to national health care.

The Confidante explores who gets to be at the forefront of history, and why. Rosenberg’s position as “the power behind,” combined with her status as an immigrant and a Jewish woman, served to diminish her importance. In this inspiring, impeccably researched, and revelatory book, Christopher C. Gorham at last affords Anna Rosenberg the recognition she so richly deserves.

Christopher C. Gorham is a lawyer, educator, and acclaimed author whose books include Matisse at War and the Goodreads Choice Award finalist, The Confidante. With degrees in history from Tufts University and the University of Michigan, he served on the editorial staff of the Syracuse Law Review while earning his J.D. from Syracuse University College of Law. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post and in online journals. He lives with his wife in Watertown and Chatham, Massachusetts, and can be found online at ChristopherCGorham.com.

Citadel
ISBN-13: 978-0806542027

Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend: Reconsidering Lincoln as Commander in Chief - REVIEW

by Kenneth W. Noe

Kenneth W. Noe’s Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend boldly questions the long-accepted notion that the sixteenth president was an almost-perfect commander in chief, more intelligent than his generals. The legend originated with Lincoln himself, who early in the war concluded that he possessed a keen strategic and tactical mind. Noe explores the genesis of this powerful idea and asks why so many have tenaciously defended it.

George McClellan, Lincoln’s top general, emerged in Lincoln’s mind and the American psyche as his chief adversary, and to this day, the Lincoln-McClellan relationship remains central to the enduring legend. Lincoln came to view himself as a wiser warrior than McClellan, and as the war proceeded, a few members of Lincoln’s inner circle began to echo the president’s thoughts on his military prowess. Convinced of his own tactical brilliance, Lincoln demanded that Ulysses Grant, McClellan’s replacement, turn to the “hard, tough fighting” of the Overland and Petersburg campaigns, when Grant’s first instinct was to copy McClellan and swing into the Confederate rear.

Noe suggests that the growth and solidification of the heroic legend began with Lincoln’s assassination; it debuted in print only months afterward and was so cloaked in religious piety that for decades it could not withstand the counternarratives offered by secular contemporaries. Although the legend was debated and neglected at times, it reemerged in interwar Great Britain and gained canonical status in the 1950s Cold War era and during the Civil War Centennial of the 1960s. Historians became torchbearers of the heroic legend and much else that we know about Lincoln, reorienting his biography forever. Based on lessons and language from the world wars, their arguments were so timely and powerful that they seized the field. Since then, biographers and historians have reevaluated many aspects of Lincoln’s life, but have rarely revisited his performance as commander in chief. Noe’s reappraisal is long overdue.

Kenneth W. Noe is the Draughon Professor of Southern History Emeritus at Auburn University. He is most recently the author of The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War.

LSU Press
ISBN-13: 978-0807185216

Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration - REVIEW

by Harold Holzer

In the three decades before the Civil War, some ten million foreign-born people settled in the United States, forever altering the nation’s demographics, culture, and—perhaps most significantly—voting patterns. America’s newest residents fueled the national economy, but they also wrought enormous changes in the political landscape and exposed an ugly, at times violent, vein of nativist bigotry.

Abraham Lincoln’s rise ran parallel to this turmoil; even Lincoln himself did not always rise above it. Tensions over immigration would split and ultimately destroy Lincoln’s Whig Party years before the Civil War. Yet the war made clear just how important immigrants were, and how interwoven they had become in American society.

Harold Holzer, winner of the Lincoln Prize, charts Lincoln’s political career through the lens of immigration, from his role as a member of an increasingly nativist political party to his evolution into an immigration champion, a progression that would come at the same time as he refined his views on abolition and Black citizenship. As Holzer writes, “The Civil War could not have been won without Lincoln’s leadership; but it could not have been fought without the immigrant soldiers who served and, by the tens of thousands, died that the ‘nation might live.’” An utterly captivating and illuminating work, Brought Forth on This Continent assesses Lincoln's life and legacy in a wholly original way, unveiling remarkable similarities between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first.

Harold Holzer is a leading authority on Abraham Lincoln and the winner of the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Educated at the City University of New York, he served as a political campaign press secretary for Congresswoman Bella S. Abzug and Governor Mario Cuomo, and was a senior vice president at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A prolific writer and lecturer, Holzer co-chaired the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, appointed by President Clinton. President George W. Bush awarded Holzer the National Humanities Medal in 2008. And in 2013, Holzer wrote an essay on Lincoln for the official program at the re-inauguration of President Obama. He now serves as the director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College and is the author, co-author, or editor of more than fifty books.

Dutton
ISBN-13: 978-0451489012

The Chosen and The Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States - REVIEW

by David J. Silverman

This year mark the 250th anniversary of American Independence, and it's imperative we consider the integral role Indigenous people have played, and continue to play, in our national history. The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States is a sweeping chronicle examining how White identity, defined against Native Americans, became central to American nationhood, from Professor David J. Silverman, the award-winning author of This Land Is Their Land.

A genocidal struggle for America unfolded over the course of generations, shaping the social, political, and cultural arrangements that sustained America's racial divisions. Euro-Americans developed a sense of superiority, racial identity, and national mission of "being chosen." They claimed that Indians were damned to disappear so Whites could spread Christian civilization. Indigenous people countered that the Great Spirit had created Indians and Whites separately and intended America to belong to Indians alone.

When the colonial era began, Europeans did not consider themselves as “Whites,” and Native Americans did not think of themselves as “Indians.” Yet as a genocidal struggle for America unfolded over the course of generations, all that changed. Euro-Americans developed a sense of racial identity, superiority, and national mission-of being chosen. They contended that Indians were damned to disappear so Whites could spread Christian civilization. Native people countered that the Great Spirit had created Indians and Whites separately and intended America to belong to Indians alone.

In The Chosen and the Damned, acclaimed historian David J. Silverman traces Indian-White racial arguments across four centuries, from the bloody colonial wars for territory to the national wars of extermination justified as “Manifest Destiny"; from the creation of reservations and boarding schools to the rise of the Red Power movement and beyond. In this transformative retelling, Silverman shows how White identity, defined against Indians, became central to American nationhood. He also reveals how Indian identity contributed to Native Americans' resistance and resilience as modern tribal people, even as it has sometimes pit them against one another on the basis of race.

Silverman traces Indian-White racial arguments across four centuries, from the bloody colonial wars for territory to the national wars of extermination justified as Manifest Destiny; from the creation of reservations and boarding schools to the rise of the Red Power movement He also reveals how Indian identity contributed to Native Americans' resistance and resilience as modern tribal people, wen as it has sometimes pit them against one another on the basis of race. The Chosen and the Damned ultimately seeks to redress the absence of Indigenous people in histories of race in America.

David J. Silverman is a professor of history at George Washington University. He is the author of the award-winning This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, as well as Thundersticks, Ninigret, Red Brethren, and Faith and Boundaries. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, National Geographic, and the Daily Beast. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1635578386

The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America - REVIEW

by Michael Eric Dyson

Michael Eric Dyson explores the powerful, surprising way the politics of race have shaped Barack Obama’s identity and groundbreaking presidency. How has President Obama dealt publicly with race—as the national traumas of Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott have played out during his tenure? What can we learn from Obama's major race speeches about his approach to racial conflict and the black criticism it provokes? 

Dyson explores whether Obama’s use of his own biracialism as a radiant symbol has been driven by the president’s desire to avoid a painful moral reckoning on race. And he sheds light on identity issues within the black power structure, telling the fascinating story of how Obama has spurned traditional black power brokers, significantly reducing their leverage. 

President Obama’s own voice—from an Oval Office interview granted to Dyson for this book—along with those of Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and Maxine Waters, among others, add unique depth to this profound tour of the nation’s first black presidency.

Michael Eric Dyson is a New York Times op-ed contributor, a Georgetown University professor, an MSNBC political analyst, and best-selling author of seventeen books, including the American Book Award-winning Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN-13: 978-0544387669

Wait for Me: A Novel - REVIEW

by Amy Jo Burns

Young folk singer Elle Harlow reaches the height of her prowess in 1973, with two wildly beloved albums to her name and a hidden history of impossible heartbreak. When she sets foot on the famed Grand Ole Opry stage, a far cry from the mountain that raised her, Elle gives the biggest performance of her life. Then, to the dismay of shocked fans, her producer, and the man who still loves her, she vanishes.

Almost two decades later, eighteen-year-old Marijohn Shaw is spending her summer pumping gas, writing songs on her broken mandolin, and longing for a mother. Her father, Abe, has always sworn he was the last person to see Elle Harlow alive, but when a meteor strikes the woods of their sleepy Pennsylvania town and a piece of Elle’s past emerges from the wreckage, the truth of her disappearance sets fire to everything Marijohn believes about herself, her music, and her ability to love with abandon.

Wait for Me exalts the lush hills of Appalachia and the bright lights of Nashville as it reveals the legacy of Elle Harlow, the bold voice that defined her, the intimate betrayal that undid her, and the unexpected faith of another young woman determined to resurrect her.

Amy Jo Burns is the author of the memoir Cinderland and the novels Mercury, and Shiner, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, NPR Best Book of the year, a Modern Mrs. Darcy Book Club selection, and “told in language as incandescent as smoldering coal,” according to The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Elle, Good Housekeeping, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and the anthology Not That Bad.

Celadon Books
ISBN-13: 978-1250399304

Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America - REVIEW

by Howard Bryant

A path-breaking work of biography of two American giants, Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson, whose lives would forever be altered by the Cold War, and would explosively intersect before its most notorious weapon, the House Un-American Activities Committee — from one of the best sports and culture writers working today.

Kings and Pawns is the untold story of sports and fame, Black America and the promise of integration through the Cold War lens of two transformative events. The first occurred July 18, 1949 in Washington, D.C., when a reluctant Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star who integrated the game and at the time was the most famous Black man in America, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee to discredit Paul Robeson, the legendary athlete, baritone, and actor — himself once the most famous Black man in America. The testimony would be a defining moment in Robinson’s life and contribute heavily to the destruction of Robeson’s iconic reputation in the eyes of America.

The second occurred June 12, 1956, in the midst of the last, demagogic roar of McCarthyism, when a battered, defiant Robeson – prohibited from leaving the United States – faced off in a final showdown with HUAC in the same setting Robinson appeared in seven years earlier. These two moments would epitomize the ongoing Black American conflict between patriotism and protest. On the cusp of a nascent civil rights movement, Robinson and Robeson would represent two poles of a people pitted against itself by forces that demanded loyalty without equality in return – one man testifying in conflicted service to and the other in ferocious critique of a country that would ultimately and decisively wound both.

In a time of great division, with America in the midst of a new era of retrenchment and Black athletes again chilled into silence advocating for civil rights, the story of these two titans reverberates today within and beyond Black America. From the revival of government overreach to curb civil liberties to the Cold War-era rhetoric of “the enemy within” levied against fellow citizens, Kings and Pawns is a story of a moment that remains hauntingly present.

Howard Bryant is the author of 11 books, including Rickey, The Heritage, Full Dissidence, and The Last Hero, a biography of Hank Aaron, which was named “One of the Ten Best Books of the Year” by Dwight Garner of The New York Times. Bryant served as guest editor of The Best American Sports Writing in 2017, and has been the sports correspondent for NPR’s Weekend Edition since 2006. He is a four-time finalist for the National Magazine Award, an Emmy Award winner, and is twice the winner of the Casey Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year. He lives in Western Massachusetts.

Mariner Books
ISBN-13: 978-0063308169

Classic Literature by Black Authors (part 1)

"The Color Purple" by Alice Walker

"Beloved" by Toni Morrison

"Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler

"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou

"Black Boy" by Richard Wright

The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding - REVIEW

by Joseph J. Ellis

An astounding look at how America’s founders—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Adams—regarded the issue of slavery as they drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. A daring and important work that ultimately reckons with the two great failures of America’s founding: the failure to end slavery and the failure to avoid Indian removal.

On the eve of the American Revolution, half a million enslaved African Americans were embedded in the North American population. The slave trade was flourishing, even as the thirteen colonies armed themselves to defend against the idea of being governed without consent. This paradox gave birth to what one of our most admired historians, Joseph J. Ellis, calls the “great contradiction”: How could a government that had been justified and founded on the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence institutionalize slavery? How could it permit a tidal wave of western migration by settlers who understood the phrase “pursuit of happiness” to mean the pursuit of Indian lands?

With narrative grace and a flair for irony and paradox, Ellis addresses the questions that lie at America’s twisted roots—questions that turned even the sharpest minds of the Revolutionary generation into mental contortionists. He discusses the first debates around slavery and the treatment of Native Americans, from the Constitutional Convention to the Treaty of New York, revealing the thinking and rationalizations behind Jay, Hamilton, and Madison’s revisions of the Articles of Confederation, and highlights the key role of figures like Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet and Creek chief Alexander McGillivray.

Ellis writes with candor and deftness, his clarion voice rising above presentist historians and partisans who are eager to make the founders into trophies in the ongoing culture wars. Instead, Ellis tells a story that is rooted in the coexistence of grandeur and failure, brilliance and blindness, grace and sin.

Joseph J. Ellis is the author of many works of American history, including Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, which won the National Book Award. He lives on Hawk Mountain, in Plymouth County, with his wife and two labradoodles.

Knopf
ISBN-13: 978-0593801413