Category: African American Literature

January 27, 2012

Hellhound on his Trail by Hampton Sides *** (of 4)

Hampton Sides gimmick as a writer is to start two or three parallel stories and watch as they converge in a single moment in history. ...

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January 9, 2011

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson **** (of 4)

Immediately following the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation most African Americans in the south were subject to what we today would call a campaign...

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October 31, 2010

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston **** (of 4)

Written in 1937, Hurston captures the lives of post-slavery, southern African Americans battling to overcome poverty and profound segregation. Janie, the story’s protagonist, is married...

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July 14, 2010

Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes *** (of 4)

This is such an accurate rendtion of 1960s Harlem I could smell the trash in the streets, sense the despair, hear the sirens, and feel...

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June 17, 2010

Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama *** (of 4)

Obama’s memoir of his earliest memories through his years as an organizer strike me first as the story of someone I could easily have gone...

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June 17, 2010

A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger **** (of 4)

In the early 60s the Boston Strangler attacked, murdered, and then raped eleven women in and around the city. A black man with a criminal...

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May 15, 2010

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot *** (of 4)

Cells from Henrietta Lacks’ cancerous cervix were the first to ever be cultured in a lab in perpetuity making the woman they came from in...

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May 15, 2010

The Help by Kathryn Stockett **** (of 4)

The characters in this book – racist, southern white women in the early sixties and the black maids that work for them – are so...

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April 29, 2010

Small Island by Andrea Levy **** (of 4)

There’s a reason this book won the Whitbread Award for best book of the year, one of Britain’s most prestigious literary awards. It captures the...

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April 29, 2010

Mercy by Toni Morrison **** (of 4)

A novella told mostly in the first person perspectives of an enslaved African woman, her daughter, a trader from the north, his wife, a Native...

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