TEJU COLE'S PAGE: KNOWN AND STRANGE THINGS; TREMOR; EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF

KNOWN AND STRANGE THINGS: Essays
TEJU COLE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$5.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A blazingly intelligent first book of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief

With this collection of more than fifty pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today’s most powerful and original voices. On page after page, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram. Cole brings us new considerations of James Baldwin in the age of Black Lives Matter; the African American photographer Roy DeCarava, who, forced to shoot with film calibrated exclusively for white skin tones, found his way to a startling and true depiction of black subjects; and (in an essay that inspired both praise and pushback when it first appeared) the White Savior Industrial Complex, the system by which African nations are sentimentally aided by an America “developed on pillage.”

Persuasive and provocative, erudite yet accessible, Known and Strange Things is an opportunity to live within Teju Cole’s wide-ranging enthusiasms, curiosities, and passions, and a chance to see the world in surprising and affecting new frames.

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My Review: Teju Cole says clearly and distinctly: "I am a novelist, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point." This is true; though he does not say a word about a novel not being pointed. All of his very much are; so are his essays collected here.

Fragments might be a better term for the shrapnel in this collection. None of them dig into their topic, develop a theme to a conclusion. It's more postmodern than that. I was "treated" to the horrors of mob justice in Nigeria; the fact of colorism, a strain of racism, in Brazil; the shame that's missing from the US's reckoning with its sin of racism and its ugly consequences; the horrors of Israeli apartheid (pre-2025):

The reality is that, as a Palestinian Arab, in order to defend yourself against the persecution you face, not only do you have to be an expert in Israeli law, you also have to be a Jewish Israeli and have the force of the Israeli state as your guarantor…Israel uses an extremely complex legal and bureaucratic apparatus to dispossess Palestinians of their land, hoping perhaps to forestall accusations of a brutal land grab.

An unsparing gaze, always roving, roaming wherever he is. Quite a bit of the shards are centered on the photographic, framed for visual images, moments and techniques. He is making himself Isherwood's camera: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking," only adding the thinking back, more in the vein of James Baldwin.

It is, I suppose, unsurprising that Author Cole expends a lot of his energy on thinking about race in the US, as the Obama years were recent as this collection was taking shape. As those years radicalized the lowest of the low into the actions whose disgusting fruits we're being served now, his meditations on Obama's shortcomings as president feel...true, but not really the point. (He was, in my estimation, the best Republican president since Eisenhower. Measured as a Democrat, he was abysmal.) The fact that Author Cole lived half his life in Nigeria (at the point he was writing these pieces) meant he was looking at the US reaction to a Black man as our president with detached, slightly bemused, incomprehension.

More to my own personal taste was the selection of literarians Author Cole engaged with, eg Naipaul and Walcott. Both men were still living, both were being fêted, and both are now receding from the popular literary conversation into more academic renown. It is the course things take, so I can't say "boo hoo" very convincingly. It was a pleasure to re-engage with them through the author's intense, admiring (on balance) gaze.

I'm not that confident this is a collection of enough enduring insight to survive the long test of time. It was enjoyable to me, an adult in the Aughties, an Obama voter, a reader of Naipaul; it might not reach too much lower on the age ladder to find a large audience.

Erudite, pleasant reading, in a vein of early-internet pieces that don't go as deep as the old-fashioned word "essay" implies. Solidly four stars for me; maybe different for younger folk.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF
TEJU COLE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$5.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A young Nigerian writer living in New York City returns to Lagos in search of a subject—and himself.

Visiting Lagos after many years away, Teju Cole's unnamed narrator rediscovers his hometown as both a foreigner and a local. A young writer uncertain of what he wants to say, the man moves through tableaus of life in one of the most dynamic cities in the world: he hears the muezzin's call to prayer in the early morning light, and listens to John Coltrane during the late afternoon heat. He witnesses teenagers diligently perpetrating e-mail frauds from internet cafes, longs after a woman reading Michael Ondaatje on a public bus, and visits the impoverished National Museum. Along the way, he reconnects with old school friends and his family, who force him to ask himself profound questions of personal and national history.

Over long, wandering days, the narrator compares present-day Lagos to the Lagos of his memory, and in doing so reveals changes that have taken place in himself.

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My Review: A personal story of alienation, of reckoning with social and societal change, and the shifting bonds of family, we're in Lagos in the Aughties. We're following an unnamed narrator as reacclimates to life in Lagos after years spent in New York City.

It's autobiographical, or I'll eat my hat. Details have likely been massaged...reality doesn't often lend itself to this level of dramatic tension...but it's a roman à clef for his scoobygroup and autofiction for us on the outside. The level of social critique involved in observing his homeland, for it still very much is that to him, is all-consuming. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is done in Lagos to benefit anyone but the self. It's a prescient, if unintentional, alarm klaxon for the world of 2026's kakistocratic enshittification of the US: "What the trip back from the airport makes me think, and what is confirmed over the course of the following days, is the extent to which Lagos has become a patronage society". Everything old is new again....

Author Cole views this hypercapitalist dystopia with a level of humorous detachment that floats on a deeper pool of disillusionment. In many ways I felt I was reading a journalist's too-long think piece about homegoing, rejected by an editor who wanted 1000 words not 30,000. It's a novella-length work of self-analysis, working through the hurts inflicted by choosing outsiderhood over ill-fitting conformity. In no way is this Manhattanite going to submerge without a ripple back into the pool he climbed out of. Having experienced this myself, I was completely in tune with the narrative's driving force and direction.

I can't offer a fifth star because the double whammy of brevity, lack of space to develop the others in the story beyond foils for narrative reflection and amplification as outlines not rounded people, and an outsider-plus sense of superiority inherent in this return from a wealthier world.

It's an enjoyable story, if not a full novelistic reading experience.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

TREMOR
TEJU COLE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A powerful, intimate novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world—from the award-winning author of Open City

Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.

A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis.

We’re invited to experience these events and others through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life.

Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles,” but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.

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My Review: Rejecting tradition..."{I} wanted to give myself a chance to make something that could fail. I don’t know that people are doing enough with their freedom as writers—to keep doing this 19th-century thing bores me"...is often risky, even when you work inside the established alternatives to "the 19th-century thing" like modernism and its cousins. Here Tunde, our PoV character, is followed through a format I'd call braided stories around a stream-of-consciousness heart. Tunde's PoV third-person narrative shifts to fourth-wall-breaking first person at times, then into the satanic-second person as he addresses someone over our shoulder somewhere.

It's a complex read. It does little heavy lifting for you. It's your job as The Reader to supply your own thoughts about the purpose of Tunde's telling us his stories, giving us a story-mooning of his ass as we decide how to feel about that..."Tunde is startled out of these thoughts by {his wife}'s's return from work. They talk for a moment. She remains downstairs. He moves upstairs to her study. The room is lit by a single lamp and he continues reading" tells its own punch of a story about intimacy's failures and his failings in an introductory moment...we're launched into Tunde's trenchant observations: "It was in a shop among the unrelated treasures white people had collected by fair means or foul from across the globe. In the West a love of the "authentic" means that art collectors prefer their African objects to be alienated so that only what has been extracted from its context becomes real. Better that the artist not be named, better that the artist be long dead. The dispossession of the object's makers mystically confers monetary value to the object," on the eternal nexus of culture, cultural appropriation, and colonialism.

Without a guide.

Tunde tells you what's what. From his position inside the colonizer/appropriators' world. Is he aware he's not reckoning with his own foothill of privilege adjacent to and causally connected to the mountains of privilege he's commenting on? I don't know. We're not told.

If you're going to experiment with style, do it interestingly. Build the maze and trust me to find a way out. Notice: A not The. I think this sums up the experience of reading this novel:

On his return he thought he was thinking of a photograph but he realized that he was thinking of a photographic negative, the colors inverted and left and right flipped. But it became clear to him that what he was actually thinking of was a photographic negative that had been made but had gone missing before it could be printed. And finally he realized that no, the negative had not even ever existed, it was all in the imagination or it was all in the future and he was thinking of a picture that existed only in the mind of the one who was thinking it. The more he tried to describe it the more elusive it was. It was there but it could not be looked at directly. At best it could only be seen out of the corner of the mind's eye and this was the way one might begin to speak of the city.

You're going to think this is a more interesting read after you've developed the negative, the text on the page, in your mind's developer bath. You're participating in framing the shot, in selecting the size...north-south, east-west, all or nothing on these meanings for a city's future (this only makes sense after reading the book)...and saturation of the print.

It's not easy but it's involving, it's exciting in the right mood, and it's using the 19th-century thing to mold a 21st-century object, a European art to draw an African subject. Did it fail?

Only a little around the middle saggy bits. Overconfidence in the reader leads some parts to feel unsatisfyingly undeveloped; untrusting of the readers' cultural background leaves other a mucky slog through extremely specific details that were not mission critical.

So, no full-five from me; but a half-star above "good" is "very good" and my three-quarters star is "very good indeed." It will be a read you invest in or bounce hard off; make your acquisition decisions carefully, try a sample or use the library; I hope you'll at least give it a try.

PROFESSOR SCHIFF'S GUILT, humor is hard, but better when hard-edged

PROFESSOR SCHIFF'S GUILT
AGUR SCHIFF (tr. Jessica Cohen)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A stellar novel rendered into a darkly comic, unforgettable narrative by Booker International Prize winning translator Jessica Cohen.

An Israeli professor travels to a fictitious West African nation to trace a slave-trading ancestor, only to be imprisoned under a new law barring successive generations from profiting off the proceeds of slavery. But before departing from Tel Aviv, the protagonist falls in love with Lucile, a mysterious African migrant worker who cleans his house.

Entertaining and thought-provoking, this satire of contemporary attitudes toward racism and the legacy of colonialism examines economic inequality and the global refugee crisis, as well as the memory of transatlantic chattel slavery and the Holocaust. Is the professor’s passion for Africa merely a fashionable pose and the book he's secretly writing about his experience there nothing but a modern version of the slave trade?

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My Review: I'm willing to bet that most people squirm just reading the synopsis. It's a reckoning with the long shadow of chattel slavery and its ties to Jewish merchants.

I think the best choice Author Schiff made was to tell the story in a comedic register, relying on farcical coincidences of crime and punishment to acknowledge past harms while lampooning present ones caused by some clumsy, bureaucratic attempt at balancing cosmic scales.

The far more interesting point Author Schiff makes, to me at least, is the sheer ubiquity of the mental construct of Africa as lesser, as broken and needing "us" to fix it. The way Professor Schiff approaches his putative project in the narrative begs the question "why are you doing this?"

As a meditation on white guilt versus White Guilt, I think it's a great contribution to necessary conversations about Jewish complicity in the crimes of chattel slavery. As a novel about an individual man's coming to self-awareness, it felt...off.

The parallels drawn between Ancestor Schiff and his appropriation of the slavegirl, and Storyteller Schiff and his relationship to his cleaner, weren't that successful in my reading eyes. They felt as performative as the arrest and legal proceedings of Storyteller Schiff did, without the sharp edge of satire to make them cut my tough hide of willful ignorance. As a result, I was more squicked out than I was challenged to contemplate the real meaning of these sexual crimes. In fact I felt less sympathy for Ancestor Schiff before Storyteller Schiff's peccadillo was brought in. I think the opposite was intended.

I know that could really be a "me" thing, but I bring it up to alert readers who find sexual exploitation deeply unpleasant that this could decrease their reading pleasure.

I'm not as delighted by the read as others were but I am happy to have read a reckoning with an underrepresented crime of historical complicity.

HOW WE HEAL: A Journey Toward Truth, Racial Healing, and Community Transformation from the Inside Out, a balm of sense and calmness in a troubled time

HOW WE HEAL: A Journey Toward Truth, Racial Healing, and Community Transformation from the Inside Out
La JUNE MONTGOMERY TABRON
Disruption Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In How We Heal, La June Montgomery Tabron, President and CEO of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, makes a powerful case for hope through racial healing.

From a vivid portrait of her childhood in 1960s Detroit to her leadership of one of the world's largest philanthropic institutions, La June shares her full-circle, American story—a coming-of-age journey where she gains a firsthand understanding of how systemic racism prevents our children and communities from thriving and learns about the transformative role healing can play in helping all of us transcend the legacy of racial inequity.

As she rises to her position as the first female and first African American leader of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation (Wikipedia link added), La June experiences the healing power of sharing and listening with empathy. And with the help of mentors and colleagues, she refines the message that will guide the foundation's mission for years to Healing can begin only with truth telling.

Empowered by the mission set forth by its founder to support children and families "without regard to sex, race, creed, or nationality," the foundation explores a racial healing framework that transforms communities and individuals around the world—from small rural towns and big cities across the United States, including La June's own beloved Detroit, to Mexico, Haiti, and beyond.

This book serves as a testament to the power of transformation and a blueprint for how each of us, no matter who we are or how we lead, can use racial healing to bridge the empathy deficits in our communities.

How We Heal illuminates a path that all of us can follow—from trust to empathy, from understanding to repair—one conversation and one connection at a time.

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My Review: We are at an inflection point in our development as a society. La June Montgomery Tabron knows this because she has lived through another inflection point: Detroit in the 1960s was on the front line of the Civil Rights struggle as African Americans asserted their right to be full participants in the US civil society that had systematically excluded them. Author Tabron is an MBA holder, thus a thoroughgoing participant in the system she is urging us to fix with her. As a professional administrator, her focus is on practical, achievable differences in one's personal behavior...listening, not simply expecting to be heard, is top of her list.

Given her long background in business, I'd expect nothing else from her. The way she brings readers along on her personal journey makes her commonsensical words all the more impactful. In a political climate of hatred and fear-stoking, of attacks on "DEI" efforts and their abandonment by many corporate entities, it is soothing to hear from the anti-DEI embodiment that is Author Tabron.

I felt I was sitting with my old friend and hearing her tell the whole story of what happened on her path to success as I read the book. It was that sort of personal connection I felt she was working to achieve, and mostly succeeded at presenting. In the moments where it was less successful it was down to not needing to be reminded of some important facts; hardly a sin in the story of a person's life.

What makes Author Tabron's point most effectively is the fact that she is drawing from her own life and her efforts to shift the course of a ninety-five-year-old multi-billion-dollar foundation as the first woman and the first African-American to head it. Her work there is clearly the source material of the book. The power of honest communication, coupled with empathetic listening, is very much the takeaway technique running through the whole story.

It is more important than ever to use our human capacity for empathy and our societally discouraged ability to listen instead of waiting to talk in order to combat the rising tide of politically motivated divisive language and ideas. The reasons for, and the ways to, apply both are in this easy-to-understand, easy-to-read, memoir.

I really hope some of y'all have reason to pick up the book to polish up the skills found inside its story.

THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND, decades lost in drawers because white people

THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND
RICHARD WRIGHT
Library of America
$19.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A major literary event: an explosive, previously unpublished novel from the 1940s by the legendary author of Native Son and Black Boy.
Fred Daniels, a black man, is picked up randomly by the police after a brutal murder in a Chicago neighborhood and taken to the local precinct where he is tortured until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit. After signing a confession, he escapes—or is permitted to escape—from the precinct and takes up residence in the sewers below the streets of Chicago.

This is the simple, horrible premise of Richard Wright's scorching novel, The Man Who Lived Underground, a masterpiece written in the same period as his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) that he was unable to publish in his lifetime. Only small parts of it have appeared in print, and in a significantly redacted form it would eventually be included in the short story collection Eight Men (1961). Now, for the first time, by special arrangement with the author’s estate, the full text of the work that meant more to Wright than any other (“I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration”) is published in the form that he intended, complete with his companion essay, “Memories of My Grandmother.” Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson, contributes an afterword.

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My Review: Richard Wright was one of the twentieth century's crop of Great American Storytellers, a writer whose entire life of creation was a gift to a country that did not deserve his passionate voice calling into the face of its indifference that we can be better, do better, and must in order to survive.

People my age were required to read Native Son in high school English, and I am so very glad we were. I wouldn't have picked up the book any other way. It needed to be shoved on me. And wonder of wonders, the Austin (Texas) Independent School District of the early 1970s did. It was a tough thing to let myself believe, that people simply but sincerely hated for no better reason than someone was a different skin color than they were. I assumed all those yahoos were just performing their snotty, hateful idiocy like they did their fake homophobia; it seemed to me that racism against Black and Hispanic students was the same. Anything to look cool, after all, and these were teenagers whose ideas of Cool were neither self-reflective nor rebellious enough to have progressed from the 1950s their own parents were stuck in.

Then we read the equally astounding true-crime (I call racism a crime and am not likely to stop doing so) Black Like Me, an account of a white man passing as Black in the Jim Crow South. It too was gut-wrenching, but was different in kind than the novel Native Son. A factual report...well, I am quite sure that my own racism got hard, hard knocks that year. (I am fully aware that I'm complicit in racist society, that in no way am I "not a racist" just because I support Black political candidates and so on.) It's a pity we couldn't have read this jaw-dropping, intense, visceral evocation of the Other as refiner and perfecter of his Othering. It is the apotheosis of Otherness and Othering that this intense story tells its readers.

Anyone who's paid me any attention knows that I can be run off from continuing a read by child abuse, by use of the n-word, by cruelty to animals...the list goes on...and not a few unfriendlies are smirking in anticipation of taxing me with this book's abusive, rage-filled, n-word-bombing ethos...how can I give this five stars and still abandon ship with content warnings in other, arguably less offensive cases? Because Richard Wright never does a single thing to make the awfulness of PoV character Fred Daniels's world sensational. The author isn't kidding around, bedizening a story with nastiness to provoke a response. He is telling a story about how Othering a man will, over time, after many small and large blows and much deliberate infliction of every kind of pain, turn him in to the thing that he was not, did not want to be, and could not bear to know that he now was.

It worked, in its honesty and its clarity of purpose. I left the sewer Fred lived in without regret, without revulsion, and with the most horrified, profound acceptance of Fred as he was abused and neglected into being. Acceptance of his re-creation, transformation.

In the inexcusably hate-filled twenty-first century, we are fighting the battle that Fred lost all over again. There are wins...the conviction of Ahmaud Arbery's murderers...there are defeats, the gerrymandering cases standing out to me as disasters to Black people...but the trend is towards, as it ever was, the endless and pointless perpetuation of hate based on stupidity among the haters and truculence among the hated.

Books like this are strong medicine against both ends of the spectrum. Fred, a victim, sees what the System does to people, and ultimately still surrenders to it. Not to fight against the dehumanizing and brutalizing actions and inactions of the system that allows Fred to exist in the literal sewers is to acquiesce in the process of creating more Freds...and that is a moral wrong and a societal tragedy. Author Wright doesn't allow his readers the luxury of redemption. This book remained unpublished for seventy years because it is the most hopeless document of degradation's triumph I've ever read. White people of the 1940s would've been offended by the clear-eyed assertion of police violence as it happened...nowadays that illusion is gone...but they wouldn't have wanted to read about a good man surrendering his humanity regardless of that knee-jerk response. The accusing fingers pointing back at them as they called out Author Wright for his bleak treatment of Fred (theirs was the system he succumbed to, after all) were simply too on-the-nose.

There is an extended essay included with the novel entitled “Memories of My Grandmother” that enables our appalled eyes to see where so much of the story we've just read originated. The fact that Christian religion played such a big role in Wright's formation into a man capable of the kind of wordsmithing he does isn't a big surprise. I'm very grateful that the author's daughter required the essay to be published within the book containing the novel...it's a long piece and, even if you're on the fence about reading the novel, I hope you'll consider procuring it to read the essay alone. It is a marvelous explication of how each generation forms the next, for good and ill.

What Author Wright isn't, in the writing of this story, is subtle. The metaphors defining it simply aren't debatable: Whites own the sunshine and consign the Blacks to the literal sewers to eke out whatever existences they can. A Black man who's innocent of any crime is shoved into the sewer with the rest of the leavings because he's never had a place in the sunshine that was truly his. As he copes increasingly poorly with the sewers, he's not allowed to leave them; he's run away from the white police, deprived them of their fun of torturing and eventually killing him, so they say "stay there and die."

The author doesn't, then, offer Redemption to either side. It's a very uncharitable and un-Christian thing to withhold. But he's got a reason, does Author Wright: "Chickens come home to roost, don’t they?" his daughter quotes him as saying.

They very much do. The perch they roost on is, in this rare and exquisitely painful read, your complicit soul.

HOW TO MAKE A SLAVE and Other Essays, a finalist for a National Book Award

HOW TO MAKE A SLAVE and Other Essays
JERALD WALKER
Mad Creek Books
$19.95 paperback or ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For the black community, Jerald Walker asserts in How to Make a Slave, “anger is often a prelude to a joke, as there is broad understanding that the triumph over this destructive emotion lay in finding its punchline.” It is on the knife’s edge between fury and farce that the essays in this exquisite collection balance. Whether confronting the medical profession’s racial biases, considering the complicated legacy of Michael Jackson, paying homage to his writing mentor James Alan McPherson, or attempting to break free of personal and societal stereotypes, Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique. The result is a bracing and often humorous examination by one of America’s most acclaimed essayists of what it is to grow, parent, write, and exist as a black American male. Walker refuses to lull his readers; instead his missives urge them to do better as they consider, through his eyes, how to be a good citizen, how to be a good father, how to live, and how to love.

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My Review: The reason we read essays, as readers, is almost the opposite of why we read fiction of all stripes, not to broaden our experience of humanness but to particularize it. Dr. Walker's essays about being Black in academia, in the slums of his boyhood, of being a small-town dad of sons who are Othered by their skin color, of being his own unique self in a world that wasn't ready with a place for him to fit, are as particular as one can hope to find. And that is why they resonate so fully with my older, whiter, place-was-made-before-I-cared self. How often have I wondered what in the hell I should say when my half-Black Young Gentleman Caller makes a joke about hair (I have next to none, his is abundant, and the contrast tickles him to no end. Ha ha ha) or his (pale) skin color..."I am closer in hue to a banana than a plum," says Dr. Walker at one point...and am left shtumm because, well, no matter that he's chosen an old white man for his confidant and bedmate, I can still hear the hurt in his voice or see it in the frozen-for-a-second smile when someone's comment is a microaggression. To my delight, my silence or my simple smiling and laughing without comment have kept me from experiencing that swallowed hurt at my words.

So far.

The years Dr. Walker spent in seeking an MFA were spent being mentored by James Alan McPherson, a monadnock of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and one of the most admired and sought-after guides to the unforgiving world of seeking literary excellence. His story collection, Elbow Room, won him the first Pultizer Prize for Fiction awarded to a Black person. Who better to create another Black male artist? And so he did, in Dr. Walker, after some rough moments at the beginning of their association. He was capable of delivering great advice, and making it go down like a spoonful of sugar instead of the bitter and damned toxic draft of reality that it truly was:

"Stereotypes are valuable," he said. "But only if you use them to your advantage. They present your readers with something they'll recognize, and it pulls them into what appears to be familiar territory, a comfort zone. But once they're in, you have to move them beyond the stereotype. You have to show them what's real."

"And what's real?" I asked.

Without hesitation, he said, "You."

That one sounds so innocent...and the one-word lance through the armor and into the heart is why so many deeply talented and delightful writers don't ever quite make it, get past the early parts of a career. How cruel it is to have to commit to endless hours of honing and polishing and rending one's psychic flesh for a few grand on a good day, and free on a bad one! But success is all in practice and work, and no one in American history has known that more than our unappreciated and unsupported artists. So few make it....

But some become epoch-defining superstars. Memories of Michael Jackson, unsurprisingly, loom large in Dr. Walker's youth as it coincided with the man's inescapable pop-culture presence in the later 1970s and early 1980s. I drove around with Michael Jackson on the radio because he was what was playing, what was in demand, whose talent and sound were *exactly* what the Whitegeist wanted. He sounded, I realized from reading the essay about him, very different to a young Black boy in the Chicago ghetto. Dr. Walker and his brothers were caught up in a different stream of the times than I was, and this passage tells me what I need to know: We shared the planet, for better or worse, in ways that can't be fully reconciled but can be felt, deeply, in our love of someone who made something powerful and lasting:

While I do not know if this is true, I have a vague memory that the three of us, in 1983, watched the Motown 25 television special together, and maybe we rose at some point to to attempt Michael's moonwalk before collapsing back into our seats, succumbing to the dope coursing through our veins, much as dope would course through Michael's, nearly three decades later, and stop his heart.

Mine stopped, for a moment, when I heard the news. And in that pause before grief, I had a vision of the Walker Six, dancing and singing...and then it was gone.

How we all mourn our quiet fantasy lives being rendered impossible by death...and who hasn't dreamed of What Might Have Been?

A place where I felt Dr. Walker's essayistic honesty let me, his happy reader, down was in a passage about an older gay man who offered cold, wet Jerald a ride to where he didn't much want to walk. He was treated to a request for sex, and handled that unwelcome advance with apolmb. He wasn't pressured or forced, he just got out of the car where he was going...was seen...and was later upbraided by his brother (whose own trajectory wasn't as happy as Dr. Walker's) and required to explain himself. Dr Walker goes on to tell us of the many signs of gayness that he and the Black community just...overlooked...because:

Blacks had had their fill of emasculation over the centuries of slavery; the need to not see male homosexuality in our community was strong.

I chose a comedy slap GIF, and one with two white men as its actors, to emphasize how deeply out of my sense of the essayist's carefully acquired sense of honest and effortful inclusion this passage is. I was gobsmacked by the casual assumption in that minor sentence, not in any way led up to or made the point of the piece, that gay men are not masculine and that to be gay is to be, like the slaves of yore, less than a man.

I can only assume that the espousal of this calumny isn't so; it's really out of character from all the other work in the book; but it left a sour place in my opinion of both work and man.

But the scars of disrespect for the community I live in are as nothing to the fears Dr. Walker woke in me with his horrifying brush with medical racism as his young son is having seizures...and the ignorant idiot in his small town's hospital, without drawing blood or doing anything at all except looking at two horror-struck Black parents of a child whose world needs to be fixed, now, or they're never ever going to be happy again, and says, "It could be syphilis."

SYPHILIS. Congenital, obviously, he's a child; and a Black child, obviously from a Black parent and we all know how THEY are about sex, so hey, maybe your child has it, what do you think?

What they thought was that a trip to Boston would get them the help they needed without the side-trimmings of racist bullshit. Paroxysmal Kinesigenic Dyskinesia is the diagnosis, a "neurological disorder that can trigger petit (mal) seizures when the body is suddenly thrust into motion." Move too quickly, get thrown into a seizure. Wow, there goes that whole school athletics program, and no way will you be getting swimming lessons, son...don't jump a lot...dancing? mmm...maybe not....

But a diagnosis. And with it, a way forward, a way to be your son's dad as he needs you to be, the one he turns to to fix the things that are wrong in his world. And that is a way forward. The meditation on being a father in that kind of terror-stress, of having the responsibility to make your child whole, cannot be more universal. Cannot be more particular. Cannot be better, more bravely, more fully honestly Himself, Dr. Jerald Walker; and that's why I rate this fascinating and touching and brutally honest collection of essays as high as I do, and hope he wins a National Book Award for it.