4.27 AVERAGE


Essential
challenging emotional informative reflective slow-paced

While I’ve known of Du Bois for as long as I can remember, this was my first attempt at reading any of his work. And I must say I wish I had read this years ago.

This book is one that should be on every shelf in America, and I mean that in the widest sense, as in North America and South America. Since it's in the public domain, it is available freely as an audiobook, beautifully read on librivox.org, and presumably also on both the project Gutenberg and the internet archives sites. Dubois mentions, in fact, very nearly the same subjects spoken of by Dr. Anna J. Cooper in her work a decade earlier in A Voice From the South by a woman of the south, except that he rarely mentions women except for Phyllis Wheatley and one or two other women. He does however, not explicitly, but still, mention the Episcopalian clergy problem, bringing up the same issue that Dr. Cooper mentioned in her work about black people being trusted to lead and educate the black community. And also the problem of the history of slavery having very real lasting impacts into the present day at that time, and unfortunately still today. What he says is the same thing that she said earlier which is that both context and history matter.
challenging informative inspiring reflective sad tense slow-paced
dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

a must read
challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective medium-paced
challenging informative reflective slow-paced

I struggled with some of the essays in this book, but others were rather brilliant. Du Bois doesn't mince words, nor should he.

Rating: 4-4.5 Stars (Very Good).