The
very first sentence of this book dropped me right into high-drama fiction
territory. But while it is a fast-paced thriller, it is not fiction.
In the big
picture it taught me so much about why America is still dealing with the
deep-seated fear of Black, immigrant, Jewish, and even Catholic Americans that
leads to both willful and unintentional discrimination, hate, and violence.
It
also made me understand why my Baptist grandparents were unwilling to attend
the wedding of my mother to my Catholic father and why my brother and I were
always a little outside the tribe.
My only complaint about this book is that it
focuses the problem on the American Heartland, with few references to the
coast-to-coast reach of the KKK movement in the early 20th century.
"With narrative elan, Egan gives us a riveting saga of how a predatory con man became one of the most powerful people in 1920s America, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, with a plan to rule the country—and how a grisly murder of a woman brought him down. Compelling and chillingly resonant with our own time." —Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile
“Riveting…Egan is a brilliant researcher and lucid writer.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of…
I
picked it up because of the title. I got hooked, to my surprise, by the wacky
point-of-view shifts and the bizarre punctuation, which was too offbeat to be poor editing.
And suddenly, it was like I was watching the movie, by turns gut-punched and
laughing out loud.
This is not Orange is the New Black (although I liked
that book too). This is a voice beyond my experience, a character outside my creative
talent, a narrative way outside my writing ability.
I want a sequel to see
where the story goes next, and I dread a sequel that will render this story and
its characters ordinary. It will entertain you, horrify you, and maybe teach
you things you never knew.
In this “dangerously hilarious” novel (Los Angeles Times), a trans woman reenters life on the outside after more than twenty years in a men’s prison, over one consequential Fourth of July weekend—from the author of the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Delicious Foods.
Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she’d grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected,…
Anyone who has ever had a job in corporate America (or
maybe any job at all) will recognize the power games the author describes. I
laughed at the absurdity, even as I recognized it, and was horrified.
Everyone
who thought (as I did) that they would get ahead by working hard and being loyal
will learn what they may already suspect: it isn’t going to happen like that.
When
I finished the book, I muttered to myself, “Is it just hopeless?” I realized the
obvious: I’ll never conquer the world that way, but hey – I don’t WANT to “Think
Like a White Man,” or dress or act or be like one either. Or be the sycophant
who makes them what they are.
Hilarious throughout, this is an eye-opening parody
at its best.
'This book rewarded me with dark, dry chuckles on every page' Reni Eddo-Lodge 'Hilarious . . . This original approach to discussing race is funny, intellectual and timely' Independent 'The work of a true mastermind' Benjamin Zephaniah
I learned early on that, for me as a black professional, to rise through the ranks and really attain power, I needed to adopt the most ruthless of mindsets possible: the mindset of the White Man who would tear your cheek from your face before he even considered turning his one first.
Under the guise of a starting-over story, this novel deals with subtle racism today, overt racism in the past, and soul-searching about what to do about it in everyday living.
East of Troost's fictional narrator has moved back to her childhood home in a neighborhood that is now mostly Black and vastly changed by an expressway that displaced hundreds of families.
It is the area located east of Troost Avenue, an invisible barrier created in the early 1900s to keep the west side of Kansas City white, "safely" cordoned off from the Black families on the east side.
