A review by asphaltjunkie
Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance by Mark Whitaker

4.0

The subject is super interesting and the writing is good, but I hate the way it's laid out. It's done chronologically, which was detrimental to my enjoyment of it because it jumped from person N to person P and then asked me to remember things from three chapters before about persons F and H that I just didn't because of how much time had passed between the time I read that chapter and the one I was currently reading. I think I'd have enjoyed the book much more if it had addressed all of the baseball stuff in one section, all of the music stuff in one section, and all of the key newspaper stuff in one section. It would have been far easier to access the interconnected nature of Pittsburgh's black renaissance if the book hadn't jumped around so much.