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Jul 06, 2017Qwfwq rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
I think this is a brilliant book for a couple of reasons. To start, it tackles a subject so emotionally charged that it is very difficult not to let the drama overwhelm everything. Slavery, like the holocaust, is a difficult thing to write about without falling into clichés about the nature of evil. The heart shouts loudly. What Whitehead manages to do is to escape history to some extent, and presents slavery as a state of mind that relates to race relations today. And he does it by making it so obviously not a real history. I read it in much the same way I read Middle Passage, by Charles Johnson; the truth being not in the historical accuracy but in tone and character. And speaking of tone, I found myself often thinking how much this book was like Zone One in evoking a tone of constant menace. I think between the two books Whitehead has put his finger on the mental state of being black in America; that even when things seem good there is always, somewhere in the back of your mind, the feeling that the zombies or the lynch mobs could come any day.