I recently read Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha M. Bain's Four Hundred Souls. It was a Peak Picks at the library--which means a 2 week checkout instead of 3--so I grabbed it up and immediately began reading. Each chapter was written by a different scholar, and is just two to three pages long. Altogether these 80-some chapters trace 400 years of slavery and white supremacy in the United States. It's a heavy narrative, and interestingly told, with each author's voice and approach varying, from poems to historical essays to first-person narrative. This gives the book a quilt-like feeling: the sum of many parts, beautiful and powerful in each piece, and overall.
It put me in mind of the Instagram account Girl Gone Golden, which posts photographs and narratives of Black folks from the late 1800s and early 1900s with a great deal of context--noting the bruising on a nursemaid's face, including videos and recordings of former slaves' stories about their lives, transforming history into something immediate and present. If you're not on the gram you can search online for excerpts (here for instance).
I also read Naturally Tan, by Tan France of Queer Eye fame. While I enjoyed the book, it's a quick and easy read, it also left me wanting more. It's a glossy breezy tale and I am happy for the author's meteoric success, but I suspect there's a deeper, more interesting story to be told.
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