An audio book. There are lots of quotes, which would be clearer in a written book. Memoir or Criticism? She debates the issue. As a black reviewer she was a bit of a trailblazer, having reviews in many publications. She thinks about the process of aging, of the role-models who shaped her over the years. She identified with black male entertainers. She noticed when black women started using language about justice and other abstracts, language that white man used. She seems to like people who created new role-models and/or ignored old ones. Ella Fitzgerald sweated on TV and was portly. Josephine Baker broke new ground.
Were it all like the Ella Fitzgerald section, I'd have thought it a good book. Were it all like the Willa Cather section I'd have thought it distinctly average.
Other reviews
- Abhrajyoti Chakraborty (Even as you are thrilled by Jefferson’s admissions and ambivalences, and taken in by the range of her whims and passions, you can’t help but wonder why it is just “American culture” that she wants to resettle, why her attention to the ways in which whiteness corrupts with the “expedient innocence of privilege” doesn’t take into account the fact that American omniscient narrators, both white and non-white, in fiction as well as nonfiction, repeatedly fail to acknowledge the existence of lives outside their country’s borders.)
- kirkus reviews (A chapter about her disenchantment with Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark due to its homage to White superiority is tinged with academese, and her meditation on Josephine Baker has a more distanced, elegiac feel and is weighed down by too many quotes. Nonetheless, Jefferson’s unique perspective and relentless honesty and self-examination ensure that there’s something worthwhile on every page.)
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