How to Make a Slave and Other Essays
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Finalist, National Book Award in Nonfiction
Winner, Massachusetts Book Award
A Book of the Year pick from Kirkus, BuzzFeed, and Literary Hub
“The essays in this collection are restless, brilliant and short.…The brevity suits not just Walker’s style but his worldview, too.…Keeping things quick gives him the freedom to move; he can alight on a truth without pinning it into place.” —Jennifer Szalai, the New York Times
For the black community, Jerald Walker asserts in How to Make a Slave, “anger is often a prelude to a joke, as there is broad understanding that the triumph over this destructive emotion lay in finding its punchline.” It is on the knife’s edge between fury and farce that the essays in this exquisite collection balance. Whether confronting the medical profession’s racial biases, considering the complicated legacy of Michael Jackson, paying homage to his writing mentor James Alan McPherson, or attempting to break free of personal and societal stereotypes, Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique. The result is a bracing and often humorous examination by one of America’s most acclaimed essayists of what it is to grow, parent, write, and exist as a black American male. Walker refuses to lull his readers; instead his missives urge them to do better as they consider, through his eyes, how to be a good citizen, how to be a good father, how to live, and how to love.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Racism is no laughing matter, but professor and essayist Jerald Walker shows that sometimes a dose of cutting humor can do the topic justice. Walker’s anecdotes about his near-daily racist encounters—an aggressive campus security officer demanding to see identification while he’s on the way to his own classroom, a doctor in his small Massachusetts college town blithely suggesting that his preteen son’s seizures might be caused by syphilis—are both shocking and telling. But, as he himself says, he’s never “just about race.” Although Walker’s Blackness is ever present, these essays offer nuanced and deeply personal takes on difficult topics like colorism and homophobia in the Black community, along with reflections on the everyday ups and downs of parenting. In particular, the essay on what Michael Jackson meant to young Black kids in the early 1980s is some of the most heartbreaking cultural criticism we’ve read in a minute. Walker’s conversational tone and wicked-sharp wit make this an incredibly compelling read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Walker (Once More to the Ghetto), an Emerson College creative writing professor, delivers a stylish and thought-provoking collection of reflections on his personal and professional life. Beginning with Frederick Douglass's famous declaration, "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man," Walker tackles a number of themes through his 22 selections. Parenting and disability is one: he is the child of blind parents, and the parent of a son with a neurological disorder that causes seizures. His life as a writer is another, with a particular emphasis on paying tribute to his late writing teacher, short story writer James Alan McPherson. Life in academia is yet another the struggles of graduate school, job seeking, and attaining tenure, and, at times, of being the only Black person in a white milieu. Race threads its way through many of the essays, which reveal the subtle indignities often suffered by Black people in public settings. Nonetheless, he writes, "the stories that I favor are not only upsetting, but uplifting." Walker's rich compilation adds up to a rewardingly insightful self-portrait that reveals how one man relates to various aspects of his identity.
