Burning All Illusions: Writings from The Nation on Race (Nation Books) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560253843 ISBN 13: 9781560253846

Publisher: Nation Books, 2002

Synopsis

Burning All Illusions is a collection from The Nation archives of the best writing on race and civil rights from the magazine’s founding in 1865 to the present. It features selections by such insurgent American writers as Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ishmael Reed, and Patricia J. Williams, representing a diverse range of political and personal points of view that illuminate The Nation’s steadfast commitment to racial justice, each infused with the moral passion and urgency that the subject demands. The writers in this anthology have addressed these questions not to embitter but to provoke, educate, arouse, and inspire. James Baldwin once wrote that “the story of the Negro in America is the story of America.... It is not a very pretty story.” Baldwin and others in this collection shed light on the ugliness of American racism to certify that it is intolerable, that America can—must—do better. “The Nation’s editors ... have provided space for those persistent and ... often lonely voices inveighing against the evils of racial injustice.”—Derrick Bell

About this title

From Booklist

From the files of the Nation, which span from the Civil War era to the present, editor Giddings selects commentary and articles on the substance and concerns of race and civil rights matters in the U.S. The Nation, founded by abolitionists, has published such famous and fervent civil rights activists as W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones, James Baldwin, Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, John Edgar Wideman, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes, who are represented here, along with letters from readers, such as that from a white man who justifies a lynching after a race riot in 1916 and from white liberals reflecting on racial matters during the last century and a half. The collection's great time span, encompassing Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the periods before and after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, and the variety of the writers presented make for great depth and broad perspective on the issues surrounding the gross contradictions of racial inequities and espoused traditional American values. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Publishers Weekly

W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Sherwood Anderson, Ralph Ellison, Randall Kennedy and Patricia J. Williams are among the writers and thinkers anthologized in Burning All Illusions: Writings from The Nation on Race. Edited by commentator and Smith College African-American studies professor Paula Giddings (In Search of Sisterhood), the book collects pieces published in the magazine from the Reconstruction period through this year, including a nuanced 1923 sketch of four people who straddle the color line, a 1916 letter to the editor in defense of lynching, Hoyt W. Fuller's 1963 report on the "Rise of the Negro Militant," Gerald Early on blacks and sports, and much more.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Nation Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1560253843
• ISBN 13: 9781560253846
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Giddings Paula J.