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How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries
by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
The New York Times bestselling author of Begin Again confronts America's unfinished story in this blistering reassessment of race, freedom, and the myths that bind us.
Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American history and the country's enduring refusal to face its true nature—especially at the moments when national anniversaries steer us back toward the mythology meant to disguise the truth.
America, U.S.A., deliberately formulated and beautifully written, details a heart-wrenching exploration of America's legacy. It is a magnificently complex combination of lessons and voices—from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.—that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. Glaude's is a powerful voice of conscience in our tumultuous world. He pulls no punches, calling on us to interrogate our conceptions of innocence and freedom and the stories we tell ourselves about our past and present.
Centered around the major celebrations of America's milestone birthdays across 250 years of history, the book offers a riveting look at the battles over who has a stake in writing the American story. Devastatingly candid, profoundly moving, and deeply reflective, America, U.S.A. is a shining meditation on how we must reckon with a grim past in order to strive for the better angels of our future.
"The upshot isn't just a searing revisionist history but a stirring view of America as a place 'worth fighting for.'" —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A charged renunciation of American unfreedom that could not be timelier." —Kirkus Reviews
"America, U.S.A. is a bracing and elegant analysis of the contradiction at the heart of the American experiment: a country that claims to be committed to equality also adheres to white supremacy. Glaude opens a necessary conversation as we reflect on the meaning of our country's 250th anniversary." —Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University, Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello
"Eddie Glaude reckons with the power of our stated values—liberty, freedom, equality, and independence—in the dim light of our actual unwillingness to share, sacrifice, yield, and prosper for the national good. Glaude is honest, bracing, and devastatingly brilliant." —Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a National Book Award Finalist
This information about America, U.S.A. was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University and author of New York Times bestselling Begin Again and Democracy in Black.
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