"A meaningful panoramic view of what it means to be human...Cause for celebration." —
Times-Picayune
From the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist
Let the Dead Bury Their Dead
comes a moving, cliché-shattering group portrait of African Americans at the turn of the twenty-first century.
In a hypnotic blend of oral history and travel writing, Randall Kenan sets out to answer a question that has has long fascinated him: What does it mean to be black in America today? To find the answers, Kenan traveled America—from Alaska to Louisiana, from Maine to Las Vegas—over the course of six years, interviewing nearly two hundred African Americans from every conceivable walk of life. We meet a Republican congressman and an AIDS activist; a Baptist minister in Mormon Utah and an ambitious public-relations major in North Dakota; militant activists in Atlanta and movie folks in Los Angeles. The result is a marvellously sharp, full picture of contemporary African American lives and experiences.