Book Review: A Black Radical Intellectual Hero Writes, And Scholars Rescue, A Victory-Tinged History

Walter Rodney’s notes of his 1970-1971 lectures have been shaped into a book by Robin D.G. Kelly, Jesse Benjamin and Vijay Prashad. In this book, the professor Walter Rodney and his Tanzanian students are studying the possible future of Africa by studying the past victories and mistakes of Europe, since Marxism was being tested across the African mainland and around the world.

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Book Review: Michael Eric Dyson And “Official And Safe Lines Of Thought”

What Truth Sounds Like: RFK, James Baldwin and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America.Michael Eric Dyson.St. Martin’s Press, 294 pp. $24.99. Reviewed by Todd Steven Burroughs This review admittedly asks an unfair question: If Michael Eric Dyson had written the 1961 film version of “A Raisin in the Sun” instead of the play’s creator,…

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BOOK REVIEW: ZORA TAKES (HER) TIME, AND FREEZES IT BLACK

Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” Zora Neale Hurston. Edited by Deborah G. Plant. Foreword by Alice Walker. Amistad, 208 pp., $24.99. Reviewed by Todd Steven Burroughs Keeping your true name. Keeping your customs. Building your home. Building a community. Zora Neale Hurston of all-Black Eatonville, Fla., understood this African combination of self-respect…

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