BookDragon Blog

*STARRED REVIEW
In their joint introduction, four The College of New Jersey colleagues – three African American women, one gay white man, all PhD-ed – declare, “Toni Morrison is our greatest living historian about love, race, nation, and just about everything else of consequence.” The Nobel Laureate passed in 2019, but her legacy only grows as societal necessity. For two years, the authorial quartet met to discuss Morrison’s texts, an intellectual exploration that inspired deeply personal examination: “Morrison was quite simply the most logical way we found to say what we wanted to say about the current state of America.”

Here, their raw, resonating revelations get enhanced by a roster of empathic aural ciphers. Cassandra Jackson, voiced by a steely Bahni Turpin, internalizes the validity of Beloved’s filicide as she parents her own Black son amidst the constant threat of police violence. Daniel Henning, who also reverently reads the introduction, crisply becomes Juda Bennett, who recognizes “white privilege right next to its kissing cousin, white cluelessness,” and who attempts to teach Beloved to a group of women’s maximum-security prison inmates, but self-admittedly fails.

Jamaican American Winnifred Brown-Glaude, voiced by chameleonic Adenrele Ojo, draws on Song of Solomon to accentuate relentless racial injustice and A Mercy to highlight surging xenophobia. Embodied with unadorned clarity by Robin Eller, Piper Kendrix Williams confronts denigrating exotification through A Mercy and explores her personal “epiphanal blackness” via The Bluest Eye.

Now more than ever, books are life-saving antidotes. Professors Bennett, Brown-Glaude, Jackson, and Williams are here, ready “to move past fear … [and] offer this book as a commitment to staving off dismay and inaction.”

Review: “Media,” Booklist Online, June 19, 2020

Readers: Adult

Published: 2020