Given recent events in Ferguson, both NPR and The New Yorker suggest reading or rereading James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Press). You can listen to the NPR spot here, and read The New Yorker article here. Also, The Daily Beast has put together a reading list for understanding "How We Got to Ferguson."The LA Review of Books has a review of Alice Goffman's On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (University of Chicago Press). Reviewer Priyanka Kumar writes,
n+1 has an online book review written by Tim Barker that examines Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr.'s Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (University of California Press) and Charles E. Cobb Jr.'s This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic)."Alice Goffman's On the Run couldn’t be more aptly titled. In the Philadelphia suburb that is the focus of Goffman’s powerful sociological study, young Black men are “on the run” for real, and they coach their preteen siblings how to be on the run. At 21, Goffman was tutoring a high school student, whose cousin introduced her to Mike, 22, on Sixth Street. Goffman began to hang out with Mike (their relationship is sibling-like), and, over time, Mike and his friends agreed to be subjects in her book. A year and a half later, Mike is sentenced to one to three years in prison and, shortly after, Goffman is accepted into a PhD program in Princeton. The two worlds — prison and Princeton — couldn’t be further apart. Goffman’s book shows how men like Mike get entangled in the criminal justice system; once they’re in, their youth is all but consumed in a spiral of police run-ins, court dates, bench warrants, prison, and probation."
Over at New Books in American Studies, there is an interview with Glenn Feldman about his new book Nation within a Nation: The American South and the Federal Government (University Press of Florida).
"Marjorie Heins crafts a complete picture of the process in which academic freedom became a “special concern of the First Amendment” (p. 8). She argues that both the legal repudiation of loyalty oaths in Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), and the witch hunts and purges of teachers leading up to the Keyishian victory still resonate today. Heins claims, “We remain a society in which the range of acceptable views is remarkably narrow and where emotional appeals often overwhelm coherent discussion of political issues” (p. 269). "The Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Clark Stoeckley's The United States v. Pvt. Chelsea Manning (OR Books), "a graphic account that combines courtroom sketches by Clark Stoeckley with trial transcripts."
And finally, The Washington Post has noted the schedule for history events at the National Book Festival here.
