Longform Nonfiction Book Reviews

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin was first published in 1963 during the emerging Civil Rights Movement and was an instant best seller. A brilliant social critic, public intellectual, and interpreter of racial myths and beliefs, Baldwin captured the zeitgeist of a country riven by race. Without prejudice or fear, he deconstructed the institution of racism in America.

The Warmth of Other Suns is a magisterial book examining the Great Migration from the South that began during World War I and lasted until the 1970s. According to Wilkerson, the Great Migration changed the dynamic between the North and the South in ways no one could have imagined.

The beauty of Nicolee McMahon’s Arte of Now: Practice of Immediacy in the Arts lies in the wisdom of creativity itself, a wisdom demonstrated 30,000 to 40,000 years ago when Homo sapiens painted prehistoric rock art (parietal art) on the walls of caves. Realistic and extinct animals, handprints, abstract dot paintings, and geometric shapes graced the cave walls, evidence that our ancestors had evolved a brain capacity that began at least 200,000 years ago. Neuroscience shows that humans are “wired to create” and use their whole brain to do so.

“There are memories for which we can live more than a life time.” Photographs over the past several years have shown migrants and refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea, some of them dying as they flee war, poverty, drought, and authoritarian regimes.