Good Books Archives - Read. Think. Act.

Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

Reading with Patrick (Aug 2017) Maybe a record of someone’s private thoughts is worthless anywhere. Certainly in jail — contraband is worth more. But I wondered if it was especially worthless in the Delta, where a calm place to read was hard to come by; where there wasn’t a bookstore for a hundred miles and families couldn’t afford a book, anyhow; and where a teacher once burst into my classroom to scold me for having the kids write about the death of a classmate, not wanting them to feel sympathy for him.

I love this book so much. As Patrick would say, “It’s real.”

Michelle Kuo has gifted to this world such an extraordinary testimony — both hers and Patrick Browning’s.

It’s a beautiful literary work that is full of thought and introspection. It is a meditation on the great questions of the human experience and how books and writing and poetry impact how we see our world.

All that beauty is wrapped around the gritty reality of rural poverty, racism, history denied, mass incarceration, failed education policies, despair, addiction and violence. And yet – there is also faith, family, resilience and love.

This story of how a daughter of Taiwanese immigrant parents, born and raised in Michigan and educated at Harvard, ended up in the Mississippi Delta teaching at an alternative school, has more plot twists than you can imagine. Only this is no work of fiction. It’s an extraordinary personal journey.

I feel inadequate to the task of reviewing this book. There is not a “genre” for this kind of non-fiction literature. It weaves the well researched history of racism and poverty in rural Helena, Arkansas, together with the writings of Leo Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass and the poetry of Yeats, Tennyson, Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Ms. Kuo and Patrick explore Haiku together day after day in a jail visitors room. She has him write letters – to his daughter and to the man he killed. Those things may seem to be incongruous on their face, but it’s about the transformative power of words, ideas and the experience of those before us to help us see who we are.

“Bad conditions could impel one to leave, but they could also sap one’s strength to go.” I found so much in these pages that resonated. I felt the struggle of the place, of the people, and the determination of this teacher to help Patrick to find in himself the things he could not see.

I highly recommend this book to every reader as it a story deeply rooted in the power of education to change lives.

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land – Monica Hesse

(Aug 2017) So much of life is intangible, and places don’t feel like they’re disappearing to the people who are living there.

This review is an ode to independent bookstores, journalists who write books, rainy vacation days and to Virginia.

My husband Tom and I like to come back to Chincoteague Island as often as we can. We eloped here in July of 2011 and we continue to come back because it is a peaceful place that speaks to us. We both grew up in small rural communities – Tom in NW Georgia and me in SW Virginia. There is something about the timelessness of this place that author Monica Hesse captures in this book about Accomack County on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

I likely would not have encountered this book except I am drawn to independent bookstores like a moth to a flame. Sundial Books on the Main Street of Chincoteague Island was featuring this book on a display that faced the front door. Perhaps it’s the cover photo that is vaguely reminiscent of the cover of Hillbilly Elegy that drew me to the book. The well written synopsis on the inside of the dust jacket and knowing it was written by a journalist with The Washington Post made it a “must have” a minute after I picked it up.

The reason I don’t mind rainy days on vacation is because they are meant for reading. In fact, I love a rainy vacation day because I rarely ever have the luxury of reading a book from start to finish in a single day. And here I was, sitting in Accomack County reading a book about the arson that gripped this rural community for five and a half months in 2012 and 2013. Over eighty-five fires, multiple fires a night, that stretched the capacity of the all volunteer fire departments to cover a rural county where they identified 1,400 abandoned buildings that were all possible targets.

I couldn’t put this book down. Monica Hesse did such wonderful research on every aspect of this story. The history of Accomack County is one I did not know, despite being a native Virginian whose own ancestors go back to the 1600s – just like many families who are central to this story. Many of us know our own stories and the stories of where we come from, but learning about the other histories of Virginia is endlessly fascinating to me. Beth Macy, a journalist with The Roanoke Times made the story of the furniture industry in southern Virginia equally captivating in her book Factory Man. I hope this is a trend that continues among journalists who see the potential for a good story to become a book of real substance.

There is a true art to writing non-fiction that reads like a novel. American Fire is well written and the structure of the story is what keeps you turning the pages to find out more. It’s about so much more than the story of the arsons and the arsonists. It’s about a way of life that most of us cannot relate to. I loved the designations of Born Heres, Come Heres and Been Heres. I get that. Her specificity of this being a “close knit community” rather than a “small community” is also important to the story because the county is large but sparsely populated.

One hundred years ago, Accomack County was the richest rural county in the nation. The railroad and potato farming created wealth and jobs for the people who lived here. The advent of the automobile was the beginning of the end of that boom time. Now chicken farming is the main industry here with Perdue and Tysons being the major employers here in the county. The population is aging and young people leave to find better opportunities on the mainland. This is the economic story of towns and counties all over America who have seen the rise and decline of industries that built and sustained communities but can sustain them no longer.

I highly recommend this book. Hesse draws you into the stories of people in a singular moment in their county’s history. While the main protagonists of this book are the arsonists, the other people central to this story are authentically drawn as well. Her research is meticulous and thorough, her end notes generous to all those who made this book possible. She is a good storyteller and this story was crying out to be told.

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

Dream Hoarders by Richard V. Reeves

This is a truly important book. Progressive politics has supported the idea of the 1% vs the 99% and that has unburdened affluent liberal thinkers from taking responsibility as part of the top 20%. There are opportunities and advantages that accrue to those in the top quintile that we are reluctant to give up – everything from the 529 savings accounts for our children’s education, to how our neighborhoods are zoned, legacy admissions to Ivy League universities and the home mortgage interest tax credit.

I was fortunate to hear Richard Reeves talk about this book at the Aspen Institute last week in DC. He makes a convincing case for how this country, so proud of it’s founding upon the ideals of social mobility and meritocracy, is becoming more rigidly stratified into classes. As a native of the United Kingdom who is now an American citizen, a resident of Montgomery County, Maryland, and a senior fellow in Economics at the Brookings Institution, he brings an unusual combination of perspectives to this study.

He’s draws on the research of other scholars to make his case, as well as from Robert Putnam’s Our Kids, J.D. Vance’s Hillybilly Elegy, and Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. From both a data standpoint and anecdotal examples, Reeves paints a picture of our country that not everyone is willing to see.

Over the last three or four decades, income inequality has increased in the United States, but only at the top. There has been no increase in inequality in the bottom 80 percent of the population. The break point is around the eightieth percentile, as David Grusky confirmed in a recent comprehensive study. “The income gap between professional-managerial class and all other classes is now very large,” Grusky concludes, “whereas the income gaps among the remaining classes are not much different from what prevailed in 1979.”

The whole concept of “hoarding opportunities” is about the cumulative effect it has not only on income but the other factors that feed into a class based system – where we went to college, what kind of employment we have and what neighborhoods we live in.

Reeves hits one of my pet peeves very hard throughout the book – internships. How they are distributed, who gets them, the fact that most are unpaid (and largely unregulated in any way) and why increasingly they are more important to better career opportunities. The chart on page 117 show internships ranked first by a survey of employers, ahead of seven other factors such as college reputation, GPA, volunteer experience and employment during college. In other words, it’s become a prerequisite to the better jobs while the distribution of those internships are vastly inequitable. One of the most telling examples in the book is how NYC Mayors Bloomberg and de Blasio sought waivers from the city’s Conflict of Interest Board in order to hire their own children as summer interns. So much for high minded liberal ideals of economic opportunity.

Throughout the book there is an emphasis on educational inequality, inherited wealth and class, how residential zoning factors into who is in the local public schools and also about the gaps in the quality of parenting.

One of the most surprising subjects in the book, and one I fully support, is his proposal in Chapter 7 Sharing the Dream around “Reduce Unintended Pregnancies Through Better Contraception.” Finally, a recognition about how unintended pregnancies affect both the parent and the child and place them both at a disadvantage for economic stability and social mobility. He talks about how our antiquated system of sex education and access to reliable contraception almost ensures that we will continue to have an entire class of economically disadvantaged Americans made up of single parent households with children.

While I applaud his research on LARCs and an honest discussion about unintended pregnancies, I will ding Richard Reeves for not saying one single word about abortion. Talk about placation politics. As a senior fellow at the venerated Brookings Institution and a researcher who wants to influence public policy, I can see why he would avoid discussing something summarily dismissed by every conservative he’s trying to persuade to his larger vision.

However, American women have a legal right to access abortion services in this country as decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in Roe v. Wade in 1972. Ever since that decision, conservative forces have systematically tried to dismantle access to those legally protected services in states across the country. EVERY SINGLE DAY there are headlines about challenges to the shut down women’s abortion clinics from Kentucky to Louisiana, Mississippi to Arkansas, Texas to Virginia. To simply ignore that as a contributing factor to the economic forces he so thoroughly examines in this book is a glaring weakness. Preventing unintended pregnancies is a laudable goal. Legislatures dictating whether women will bear the children of those unintended pregnancies is a reality he does not address. Clearly women of the upper middle class can buy abortion services no matter where they live. It’s only poor women who suffer from the lack of access to services. Talk about hoarding of opportunities!

I would highly recommend this book. Particularly to my fellow travelers in the top economic quintile of Americans. I’ve seen the enemy and it is US. The first step to solving a problem is recognizing it, naming it and owning our responsibility for it.

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

Hope in the Dark – Rebecca Solnit

(June 2017) This book is a great reminder of how life is not a perfect arc. The greatest takeaway for me is that we must embrace paradox. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The opening line of A Tale of Two Cities was written by Charles Dickens in 1859. It could describe many years in many cities from then until 2017.

We tend to fall into the trap of seeing the world in terms of “either/or” – it’s all great or it’s all terrible. Realistically, it’s never all one thing or the other. We lose sight of that reality because we are not wired to embrace the paradoxical nature of many situations that ask us to see both the darkness and the light simultaneously.

This book was originally published in 2004 with additional updated chapters added in this 2017 audio edition. It’s a reminder of what life was like after 9/11, the global nature of the Iraqi War Protests, and how people reached out to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. There was great tragedy followed by moments where “citizens” found a way to come together as an empowered force for good.

Author Rebecca Solnit points out that we are overly focused on “regime change” as the answer to social and economic justice issues. She goes global in her examples of how CULTURE change is the most lasting of change and is not dependent on who is in power in any particular government. Often, people driven change is a reaction to an oppressive regime – it galvanizes disparate groups to come together in a way that makes their unified efforts a force to be reckoned with.

She gives concrete examples of how environmental activists in the western part of the United States found common ground with ranchers who despised them. It turned out they had overlapping interests on which they could work together. It took sitting down face-to-face, person-to-person, to overcome stereotypes and objectification of “otherness” to see how their alliance could serve each group’s agenda for protecting the environment.

This book is the needed antidote to the despair many feel as they wake up each day in a dramatically altered America. We cannot embrace despair. Doing so assures that we give up our personal power to affect change. As Alice Walker pointed out years ago, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” That is the battle we must fight each day.

I highly recommend this book. It shifted my paradigm in a positive way and reminded me we have seen great challenges before and we have experienced great victories. The minute “change” becomes our “new normal” we lose all memory of how we got there. Solnit wisely points out that if we are going to build monuments, they should be built to constantly remind us of what people can accomplish and HOW they accomplished it. We should not forget the journey in celebrating the outcomes. Life *is* the journey.

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

A Cup of Water Under My Bed – Daisy Hernandez

(April 2017) I loved this book for so many reasons. Daisy Hernandez is an American, born here to a Columbian mother and Cuban father. This book is called a memoir, but it’s so much more than that. It’s the chance to see the arc of a life in this country through a different lens. Hernandez is a gifted writer and above all else, the book is beautifully written.

Her book is somewhat chronological starting with her remembered first impressions as a 5 year old child who speaks only Spanish being sent to a Catholic school in Union City, New Jersey. Her coming of age story has many things we consider common experiences, but it’s unfamiliar to those of us who do not understand the culture of her parents and their particular immigrant experience. I marked so many passages that jumped out at me as beautifully articulated thoughts intended to resonate with readers like me – those who want to understand how other people experience the world and how that feels.

“If white people do not get rid of you, it is because they intend to get all of you.

They will only keep you if they can have your mouth, your dreams, your intentions. In the military, they call this a winning hearts-and-minds campaign. In school, they call it ESL. English as a second language.”

Daisy Hernandez works hard in school and has an interest early in her life to be a writer. She earns a scholarship and attends college where she is introduced to feminist studies and meets a diverse group of young people including the first lesbians she has ever met. She is awakened to her own bi-sexuality. This is an important part of her story, but it’s only a part of it. This is an interesting observation about coming to terms with our sexuality:

“Generally speaking, gay people come out of the closet, straight people walk around the closet, and bisexuals have to be told to look for the closet. We are too preoccupied with shifting.”

She has relationships with men, with women and with transmen. This is in the late 1990s when such lifestyles are hardly mainstream. It’s important to know that this community has been there for a long time. Her relationships are important in how she sees the world. It causes her mother great pain and upsets her close relationships with her three aunties. They cannot understand this.

The chapters in her book are shaped by addressing different aspects of her life – she is a Latina, she is bi-sexual, the first in her family to go to college. When she gets a summer internship at The New York Times on the editorial board, a colleague remarks she is probably the first person to ever work on that board whose parents don’t speak English. She notices how little diversity there is at the Times, not just racially, ethnically and gender-wise but people who are of a different socio-economic status from the one her family is in. “We belong to a community based in part on the fact that we are all doing somewhat badly.”

She talks about learning of a concept in high school her teacher calls “Keeping up with the Joneses.”

“It takes years for me to understand that the Joneses happen in houses where people cook in one room and eat in another. The Joneses do not happen in places where people are called white trash and spics, welfare queens and illegals, and no one asks the Joneses if they are collecting.”Read More

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty

The most fundamental way to reduce the volatility that Americans face is through improvements in job quality . . . the Great Job Shift has resulted not only in lower wages but also unpredictable scheduling, inadequate hours, and less job security. Alongside those challenges are diminishing opportunities for training and advancement, and an erosion of benefits such as paid leave and employer provided health care and retirement coverage.

Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider presented the findings contained in their book The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty at the Aspen Institute’s Summit on Inequality & Opportunity held in Washington, DC, on March 16, 2017.

Researchers followed 235 low and middle-income families for one year and delved into their daily decision making about how they managed their household finances. They were from various regions of the country and represented a variety of family structures, but at least one member of every household (and often more) were working.

This is an excellent companion book to Lisa Servon’s The UnBanking of America which also addresses how working people are using every means at their disposal to make ends meet – often without the help of traditional financial institutions. In both books, the strength of the research is in the qualitative approach to understanding the real world context of decision-making. These are people’s stories – real people caught between a rock and a hard place. Data is limited in what it can show us – patterns and practices – but it’s not telling us WHY.

What Morduch and Schneider found is that people are struggling with variable income that has spikes and dips that don’t mesh with their financial obligations. Even families whose annual income is sufficient to cover their basic living expenses have months where they dip below the poverty line. Throughout this book the importance of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) kept coming up as the saving grace for families to pay down debt or get back on their feet in February and March of each year.

Living hand to mouth does not leave room for unexpected healthcare costs and car repair. Those were the two things that most often imploded a fragile budget because they are necessities. A car to get to a job was a must have for the majority of people in this research group. Which only points to the EPIC FAILURE of this country to invest in better transportation options. And health care costs for those who are uninsured are still forcing people into bankruptcy over unpaid bills.

This book covers so much territory in 178 pages. What keeps hard working people down are a confluence of factors – not just one or a few. Some of these we can lay at the feet of businesses who have shifted a certain level of risk from their own bottom lines and placed it on workers – with “just in time” staffing, variable hours and schedules, and no paid benefits. Companies now worship at the altar of profit margins and quarterly returns for shareholders – not investing in their employees as Henry Ford once did so that he created a class of consumers who could purchase what they produced. Other factors include some bad public policy.

Most government savings policies – especially tax deductions for retirement savings and housing – were directed toward high-wage employees, not janitors and cafeteria workers. In 2013, the United States spent almost $400 billion in federal tax subsidies for homeownership and retirement savings. That was 30 percent of all federal tax expenditures. About 70 percent of the savings from the mortgage interest and property tax deductions went to the top 20 percent of earners. Almost none went to the bottom 40 percent.

The reality of what people are doing to get by should give us all pause. Not enough people in our communities are thriving and the amount of energy required just to survive is not some great American Dream. It is a constant and stressful nightmare that is being handed down from one generation to the next in our post WWII economy. Wage stagnation began in the early 1970s and the picture for the future is bleak unless significant changes are made in the creation of better jobs with basic benefits, public policy that spreads out benefits to all income groups, and the willingness of financial institutions to change how they assess people’s credit worthiness and their investment in services to better support low-income working class people.

This book points out time and again that there is a difference between “insolvency” and “illiquidity.” Yet despite existing, and very sophisticated technology, and access to reams of personal financial data, financial institutions appear to have few incentives to better meet the needs of millions of working people who are struggling to match up their income to their expenditures on a weekly and monthly basis. This economic uncertainty and instability has been labeled in sociological terms as “precarity” defined as “a precarious existence, lacking in predictability, job security, material or psychological welfare. The social class defined by this condition has been termed the precariat.”

This precariat are millions of working people in this country – friends, neighbors, colleagues, co-workers and family members. We can’t begin to solve problems we don’t fully understand. This book goes a long way in describing the lives of people all around us in a way they would not likely share with us. That is a very powerful thing in seeing these issues not as ideological debates about masses of nameless faceless people we don’t know, but as humanizing issues of public policy down to the devastating financial impact of a broken down car on a neighbor’s ability to survive in very real terms.

I highly recommend this book. I think it will benefit every person who reads it.

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi – Exploring Gender Identity

(Feb. 2017) This book is so many things. At its most basic, In the Darkroom is an exploration of identity. It’s also an intimate account of a daughter’s reconnection to her parent after decades of estrangement. That reconnection came in the form of an email from her father Steven Faludi that was signed, “Love from your parent, Stefánie.” The email announced that at the age of 76, her father had undergone sex reassignment surgery in Thailand and was now a woman.

I have more than a passing understanding of the multifaceted aspects of gender identity. And yet . . . Susan Faludi takes the question of identity to a whole new level and shows the many layers and overlapping aspects of how we see ourselves. Gender is only one of those facets that creates our sense of self. And she explores how gender can also be conflated with other aspects of identity, like Jewishness.

Faludi is a researcher, writer and journalist and a well known feminist too. Yet, I was not familiar with any of her other books or articles before reading this one. She gives a thoroughly researched account of the science and psychology around the work of early “sexologists.” In 1919 in Berlin, [Magnus] Hirschfeld established the world’s first institute to study sexuality, which issued one of the earliest scientific reports on transsexual surgery.

Yet Hirschfeld espoused an ethic directly at odds with the dualism that would come to prevail in the United States later in the century. “The number of actual and imaginable sexual varieties is almost unending,” Hirschfeld wrote in 1910. “In each person there is a different mixture of manly and womanly substances, and as we cannot find two leaves alike on a tree, then it is highly unlikely that we will find two humans whose manly and womanly characteristics equally match in kind and number.”

And there we have it in 1910 – the concept that gender is on a spectrum and is not just a binary.

There is also a fascinating chapter on how feminism and feminists have dealt with the question of transgender women. That has been quite an evolution and she pulls from many published works to show just how varied and passionate the views are among transwomen themselves.

This book also provides a fascinating history of Hungary. While that was most unexpected, I enjoyed learning the history of this country through the story of her father’s life and his family’s history there. It is the most personal of journeys through a country’s long and fraught existence and it comes to life through the impact it had on individuals whose stories emerge through Susan’s relentless pursuit of surviving family members.Read More

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

(Feb. 2017) I will never hear the phrase “jobs and the economy” again without thinking of this book. The steady advancement of technology into every aspect of our lives is slowly replacing much of our current labor force. There is no politician, no public policy, no regulatory voodoo or tax magic that is going “bring back jobs.” We need to stop believing that just because someone stands up and speaks those words that somehow they will be true.

Here’s the truth: In a free market economy where technology continues to replace human labor, we cannot add jobs fast enough for the ones being eliminated. We continue to add people to the workforce but the jobs are literally disappearing.

Technology can perform routine tasks faster, more reliably and at less expense than human labor. The recession revealed this painful fact when huge numbers of white collar workers were laid off and never rehired. In the aftermath of the recession, companies have bounced back with greater earnings than before and with a SMALLER WORKFORCE. The job growth in communities across the country has been mostly in low wage service sectors.

Martin Ford puts together the data in a compelling and very readable format.

The bottom line is that, despite all the rhetoric about “job creators,” rational business owners do not want to hire more workers: they hire people only because they have to. The progression toward ever more automation is not an artifact of “design philosophy” or the personal preferences of engineers: it is fundamentally driven by capitalism. The “rise of ‘technology-centered automation'” that Carr worries about took place at least two hundred years ago and the Luddites were unhappy about it. The only difference today is that exponential progress is now pushing us toward the endgame. For any rational business, the adoption of labor-saving technology will almost invariably prove to be irresistible. Changing that would require far more than an appeal to engineers and designers: it would require modifying the basic incentives built into the market economy.

Continuing to replace people with technology produces a whole host of related issues. Goods and services might end up being cheaper to produce, but who will buy them? Creating communities of people barely able to subsist will not feed a huge American economy that depends on consumer spending.

And what about our current system of taxation based on individual income? . . . we ought to transition to a form of taxation that asks more from those businesses that rely heavily on technology and employ relatively few workers. We eventually will have to move away from the idea that workers support retirees and pay for social programs, and instead adopt the premise that our overall economy supports these things. Economic growth, after all, has significantly outpaced the rate at which new jobs have been created and wages have been rising.Read More

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

Walkable City Jeff Speck Most significantly, generalists—such as planners and, one hopes, mayors—ask the big-picture questions that are so often forgotten among the day-to-day shuffle of city governance. Questions like: What kind of city will help us thrive economically? What kind of city will keep our citizens not just safe, but healthy? What kind of city will be sustainable for generations to come? These three issues—wealth, health, and sustainability—are, not coincidentally, the three principal arguments for making our cities more walkable.

This is an engaging and readable book written by Jeff Speck of Washington, DC. I was captivated by the very first page and read all the way through to the annotated footnotes (which are quite interesting.)

Since I live in a small city, located in the middle of a huge county, next to our Nation’s Capital, this is not an academic exercise. We are in the midst of making decisions about redevelopment and roads that will impact Fairfax City for the next 50 years. If a project turns out to be ill conceived or poorly executed, we will still be stuck with it for decades.

The most striking aspect of this book is how “counter-intuitive” Speck’s advice appears to be. In other words, we tend to accept what I would term “commonly held notions” about traffic, roads, parking, economic development, housing and public transportation. SURPRISE! Just because a lot of people believe something to be true, doesn’t make it true. It just makes it something a lot of people believe.

So let’s try some data analysis, case studies, some actual . . . science.

One of my favorite “aha” moments is about Induced Demand.

Induced demand is the name for what happens when increasing the supply of roadways lowers the time cost of driving, causing more people to drive and obliterating any reductions in congestion.

Speck points out that “there have been so many incentives for driving, cars have behaved like water, flowing into every nook and cranny where they have been allowed.” So our quest to widen roads and reduce congestion only creates capacity for more congestion. Logical – right? So why do we continue to build more roads to try to “ease congestion” when the data shows it just creates more?Read More

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

(Feb. 2017) I loved spending time with Michael Eric Dyson – in my car and in my kitchen. Hearing him read his own words felt very intimate to me.

He subtitles this book a sermon but I felt it was a conversation. I was not being lectured to or preached at. He refers to the listener often as “beloved” and that moniker felt genuine to me. His purpose in reaching out to us is to draw us in to see a world we may not understand.

My first thought after finishing this book is that ignorance is a choice. People walk among us harboring prejudice and biases because they have chosen not to know the world – not because anyone is preventing them from knowing the world.

I would highly recommend this audiobook. The fact that “sermon” is in the title might put a lot of people off, but don’t be put off.

The thought of spending what precious years I have on this earth living an unexamined life is anathema to me. It also perpetuates beyond my lifetime the institutional racism and sexism that plagues our country. That is not the legacy I want to leave behind for my children and grandchildren.

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing to see this book chosen by bookclubs across America as a work they want to read and discuss? It’s necessary to change people’s hearts before you change their minds. Michael Eric Dyson approaches his subject that way and his words are very compelling.