A review by haramis
Courage Has No Color, The True Story of the Triple Nickles: America's First Black Paratroopers by Tanya Lee Stone

3.0

I grabbed both of this week's SYNC offerings, but I have to admit to being underwhelmed by this one. Given the publication date, the age of the story, and the scant contemporary public information about the Triple Nickles, Stone had to stitch her narrative together from disparate pieces, and it shows. My eyebrows shot up when I realized that she was quoting a section of Isabel Wilkerson's [b: The Warmth of Other Suns.] Find your own primary sources, lady. I think if this was an area of history I read less in, I would have been less annoyed, but there are so many WWII books and books about the Black experience in the United States, and this book really didn't add anything new to those fields, but rather took from that vast pool to fill in gaps in her own story. If you were to strip out all the pieces she adds for context, there'd be a scant few pages on the Triple Nickles themselves. Write a magazine article.

If this one of the first things you've ever read about this topic or if you're in the recommended age group, add a star.