Publisher's Synopsis
Foreword by Michael Moreau When I look over the 50 or so essays here, I am struck by the expanse and depth of reading involved. It recalls the recent death of the great Alfred A. Knopf editor Sonny Mehta, whose friend Roger Cohen eulogized as wanting to be remembered "most of all as reader."My friend Fred Beauford, also an editor, publisher and writer, has read widely over a formidable range of work and I congratulate him for this achievement. I see two main themes arising from the intellectual inquiry here: the roles of the writer and artist in this late capitalist system than in many ways devalues such pursuits and, secondly, the question of just what makes an American in a world where the old standards are rapidly fading away. Those who proudly wear their MAGA hats will never again see the idealized country they imagine existed in the 1950s. Norman Rockwell has left the stage. A personal favorite is the lead essay of Evan Hughes' Literary Brooklyn, which reveals the astonishing number of literary lights who, as Hughes says, "drew much from the dangerous, volatile world the waterfront" and who once, and still, found life more accommodating than in the burgeoning metropolis across the river. Writers a disparate as Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane and Richard Wright were Brooklynites, some in the days before it was annexed by its neighboring Manhattan. It was in Brooklyn that Wright wrote Native Son and Black Boy, becoming one of the first serious writers to hold up an "unblinking mirror to America, both black and white, that said this who you really are," Beauford says.Brooklyn is now home to a new generation of writers who loom large over the world stage: Jhumpa Lahiri, Colson Whitehead, Rick Moody, Nathan Englander, Kurt Anderson, Julie Orringer, and more. In his review of Manning Marable's Malcolm X-A Life of Reinvention, so far the definitive biography of the black leader, Beauford draws an interesting analogy between Malcolm and Captain Kirk from Star Trek. "Both were forced to make use of whatever they found immediately around them; and their intelligence, and quick thinking were their main weapons against their opponents." In reading of Malcolm now half a century after his death one is struck by the dearth of inspiring leadership we have in this increasingly divisive country. And near the end Malcolm had become more a uniter that the divider he had been in his earlier affiliation with the Nation of Islam.From half a century earlier Booker T. Washington Rediscovered takes a fresh look at the man called the historically second great African American leader after Frederick Douglass. Beauford suggests that it was Washington who tried to persuade blacks that they needed to keep producing things, "like they were forced to do in slavery." This would be the way to lift all bootstraps. Editors Michael Scott Bieze and Marybeth Gasman present evidence to dispel the notion that Washington was an Uncle Tom, and that he in fact was a tireless crusader for the betterment of blacks. I hadn't known that he was the founder of what would become the respected Tuskegee Institute.In assessing 1983: Reagan, Andropov and a World on the Brink by Taylor Downing, Beauford recalls: "As a teenager I can remember thinking that because I lived in New York City, I was going to one day, perhaps soon, witness a bright flash of light and be already dead before I got to witness the enormous roar." For the baby boomers among us the Damocles Sword of nuclear catastrophe was ever present. Perhaps it's indicative of the distracted state that we find ourselves in that we are mostly oblivious to what is still the greatest threat to the future of the species.
