Category: race

Only the Dead Know It
Brooklyn A film by John Crowley Brooklyn is like a dream. Like Bridge of Spies it takes place in 1950’s America (apparently the year is 1952, because our young couple sees Singin’ in the Rain), and like that earlier movie it gets the look of the era right. But while Bridge of Spies focused on a ...
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Save Me a Spot in the Caboose
Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music by Greil Marcus. A Plume Book. 424 pp. $17.00 I read this book because Dwight Garner—my favorite reviewer at the New York Times—named it as the book he’d most like to read again for the first time. Greil Marcus is a rough contemporary of mine, just ...
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White Like Me
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. Vintage. 509 pp. $14.95 In reviewing the fourth of the Jonathan Lethem novels that I’ve read in the past couple of months, I’m thinking two things. I’m somehow glad I waited to read this one last. It feels like a culmination, the most deeply personal work in Lethem’s oeuvre, ...
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The Real Fifty Shades of Gray
Loving Day by Mat Johnson. Spiegel & Grau. 287 pp $26.00 The issue of race is so fraught these days that I’m almost afraid to write about it. I am afraid to write about it. Anything I say will offend somebody. Of course, there’s something liberating about that. I know I can’t do it right, so ...
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Tea & Pearls & the Flying Squirrel
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. A film by Alfonso Gomez Rejon. Some forty years ago, long before Netflix and movies on demand, I had a friend named Rob who was obsessed with movies in general and Robert DeNiro in particular. One evening we had Rob over with a married couple of our acquaintance, and ...
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Just Say Nope
Dope (2015) A film by Rick Famuyiwa. The first thing to say about the three protagonists in Rick Famuyiwa’s new film “Dope”—Malcolm (Shameik Moore), Jib (Tony Revolori), and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons)—is that they’re adorable! (I sound like my wife here.) As three geeks at a ghetto high school in Los Angeles, where guys routinely rob you ...
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