Search results for ""New York Review of Books""

Blackballed is Darryl Pinckney’s meditation on a century and a half of participation by blacks in US electoral politics. In this combination of memoir, historical narrative, and contemporary political and social analysis, he investigates the struggle for black voting rights from Reconstruction through the civil rights movement to Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns. Drawing on the work of scholars, the memoirs of civil rights workers, and the speeches and writings of black leaders like Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young and John Lewis, Pinckney traces the disagreements among blacks about the best strategies for achieving equality in American society as well as the ways in which they gradually came to create the Democratic voting bloc that contributed to the election of the first black president.  Interspersed through the narrative are Pinckney’s own memories of growing up during the civil rights era and the reactio

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Two supernatural crime fighters and their Rorschach-blotted best friend stumble into a plot involving UFOs, giant mollusks, and the Maluku Islands in this vivid, madcap adventure by a contemporary French artist.A tsunami slams into the Maluku islands. Giant mollusks wreak havoc. An ominous, quadrilateral UFO appears in the night sky. And a mysterious villain watches and waits in the shadows… Twin paranormal investigators, Félicien and Chris, and their best friend, Fongor, are on the case, delving into this unduly complicated and possibly nefarious plot. They’re the only ones who can unravel the mystery, but they might not—especially if they can’t stay on task. Between journeys to Uganda, primordial Earth, and the pants store, and confrontations with ghosts frozen in ice cubes, baby turtles, and an army of small, sinister men, the trio will be tested like never before as they search for clues, answers, and a good all-you-can-ea

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Weaving a tapestry of creativity and circumstance, this lauded chronicle of the many links and serendipitous meetings between giants of American culture—from Henry James to Helen Keller to Zora Neale Hurston to Marcel Duchamp—now includes a new introduction by the author.“They met in ordinary ways,” writes Rachel Cohen in her introduction, “a careful arrangement after long admiration, a friend’s casual introduction, or because they both just happened to be standing near the drinks. . . . They talked to each other for a few hours or for forty years, and later it seemed to them impossible that they could have missed each other.”Each chapter of this inventive consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between two historical figures. In 1854, Henry James, as a boy, goes with his father to have a daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady and is captured in a moment of self-consciousness about being American. Brady ret

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