Category: Book/Video Reviews

  • ‘Dear White People’: A Mixed-Race Perspective Pacific Citizen: Then National Newspaper of the JACL Los Angeles, California 2014-11-19 Christine Munteanu, Assistant Program Director Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) Last week, I watched a film called “Dear White People,” which follows the experiences of four black students at a predominately white, fictional Ivy League university. It…

  • Going to College and Learning You’re Black: The Moving Story of Little White Lie Vanity Fair Vanity Fair’s Hollywood 2014-11-25 Chase Quinn “You boys are black, and don’t you forget that.” From an early age I was taught that both my black identity and my white-Irish identity were important, and that I was never to…

  • Monday Murder Mystery: Everything I Never Told You Daily Kos 2014-11-24 Susan Grisby Everything I Never Told You: A Novel by Celeste Ng; Published by Penguin Press; June 26th 2014. 297 pages Families are probably the most mysterious strangers we will ever know. Sure, we know their names and that one is a brother or…

  • A Secret Falls From the Family Tree, and a Girl’s Identity Branches Out The New York Times 2014-11-23 Ben Kenigsberg, Film Critic ‘Little White Lie,’ a Personal Documentary About Race The documentary “Little White Lie” would be provocative simply for what it says about race and identity. The director Lacey Schwartz grew up Jewish in…

  • Racial divide: It’s a social concept, not a scientific one The Washington Post 2014-11-03 Nancy Szokan Most scientists agree that race is not a biological concept. As Wikipedia defines it, in an extremely lengthy and extravagantly footnoted entry that surely has been edited and re-edited many times, “Race is a social concept used to categorize…

  • Old Times There Are Not Forgotten The New York Times 2014-05-04 Ben Brantley, Chief Theater Critic ‘An Octoroon,’ a Slave-Era Tale at Soho Rep Some people are paralyzed by self-consciousness. The playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is inspired, energized and perhaps even set free by it. You could say that he transforms self-consciousness into art, except then…

  • ‘A Chosen Exile,’ by Allyson Hobbs [Senna Review] The New York Times Sunday Book Review 2014-11-21 Danzy Senna A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life By Allyson Hobbs; Illustrated. 382 pp. Harvard University Press. $29.95. One of the best birthday presents anybody ever gave me was a “calling card” by the…

  • ‘Empire of Sin,’ by Gary Krist The New York Times Sunday Book Review 2014-11-06 Walter Isaacson, President and CEO Aspen Institute Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans By Gary Krist; Illustrated. 416 pp. Crown Publishers. $26. When Tom Anderson’s saloon opened in 1901, at the…

  • ‘William Wells Brown,’ by Ezra Greenspan The New York Times Sunday Book Review 2014-11-14 Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita Princeton University Greenspan, Ezra, William Wells Brown: An African American Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014) If the publishing industry reflects the American zeitgeist, things have changed when it…

  • ‘Everything I Never Told You’ is Amazon’s book of the year Reuters 2014-11-08 Patricia Reaney New York Nov 8 (Reuters) – “Everything I Never Told You,” the debut novel by author Celeste Ng about a teenage girl growing up in a mixed race family in the American Midwest in the 1970s, was named Amazon’s best…