The Matter of Black Lives

May 1, 2021

Features editor and a tech reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek, Chafkin tells the story of The Contrarian, that is, billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who has significantly influenced the course of Silicon Valley. Columbia history/journalism professor Cobb and New Yorker editor Remnick illuminate The Matter of Black Lives in pieces collected from the magazine, starting with Rebecca West's account of a lynching trial and James Baldwin's "Letter from a Region in My Mind" and moving on to embrace works by Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Zadie Smith, Hilton Als, Jamaica Kincaid, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., among others (100,000-copy first printing). Having left behind her hometown in England's declining coal-mining region when her father declared There's Nothing for You Here, Brookings senior fellow Hill--now an American citizen and a former member of the National Security Council--draws on her extensive national intelligence work in Russia to warn that America's rocky situation today mirrors circumstances that led to Russia's socioeconomic decline (100,000-copy first printing). Rejecting the view that humans are irredeemably off-the-wall in their thinking (we have elucidated the laws of nature, for instance), two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Pinker argues in Rationality that we don't avail ourselves of logic in many everyday situations because we don't really need to. But we can learn how to think more logically, even as we recognize that some rational acts (he cites self-interest) can lead to damaging irrationality for society. Oxford professor Srinivasan's The Right to Sex talks about talking about sex in the #MeToo era, stating, for instance, that we need to deepen the prevailing concept of consent into something more nuanced (50,000-copy first printing). Award-winning journalist Streep's Brothers on Three revisit the players, families, and community that celebrated when the Arlee Warriors brought home the high school basketball state championship title to the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana (75,000-copy first printing).

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July 5, 2021
New Yorker staff writer Cobb (The Substance of Hope) and editor Remnick (The Bridge) present an expansive anthology of pieces from the magazine’s archives on the “political, cultural, and economic questions surrounding race and Black achievement.” James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” later published as The Fire Next Time, opens the proceedings, setting a high bar that the collection, for the most part, maintains. Other highlights include Hilton Als’s “Homecoming,” which interweaves reflections on the 1967 Brownsville uprising and the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020 with insights into the cultural burdens placed on Black artists; Renata Adler’s report on the 1964 Selma to Montgomery civil rights march, which captures the homespun feel of the movement before it was mythologized; and Sarah Broom’s “The Yellow House,” a poignant meditation on the loss of her family home in Hurricane Katrina that became a National Book Award–winning memoir. Beyond the stellar prose, what unites these pieces, which range widely in length, tone, and point of view, is Baldwin’s insight, paraphrased by Cobb, that “the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as our capacity to grapple with .” This standout anthology illuminates a matter of perennial concern.

July 15, 2021
Exemplary gathering of writings on Black history, arts, politics, and culture in America. Not all the writers in this New Yorker compilation are Black--e.g., Renata Adler, Calvin Trillin, Malcolm Gladwell--but the most compelling of the pieces are drawn from lived experience. As Cobb writes, "in its early decades, [the magazine] largely kept the subject of race at a distinct remove from its readers." However, in 1962, as the civil rights movement grew in strength and intensity, the New Yorker published an essay that resounds throughout this book. Called "Letter From a Region in My Mind," James Baldwin's piece angrily denounced a system in which "the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account," one in which Black people "are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world." In the following essay, Toni Morrison recounts an attempt to write about race in such a way as "to defang cheap racism, annihilate and discredit the routine, easy, available color fetish, which is reminiscent of slavery itself." Politicians come in for close scrutiny, with Barack Obama called into question for avoiding overt questions of race while addressing Black audiences with "veiled dispatches and surreptitious winks," while forgotten heroes get their due. For example, Kathryn Schulz praises Pauli Murray, whose "law-school peers were accustomed to being startled by her," both for her brilliance and foresight: In 1944, she prophesied that within 25 years, Plessy v. Ferguson would be overturned (it took a decade). Rappers, artists, curators, and scholars all get their say. Most urgently, the final section of the book addresses the emergence of an ever more organized Black resistance following the murder of George Floyd. Other contributors include Jamaica Kincaid, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Hilton Als, Stanley Crouch, Zadie Smith, and Edwidge Danticat. An essential volume for readers interested in the Black past and present, as all readers should be.

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