Review by Booklist Review
Award-winning fiction writer and memoirist Wideman returns with a genre-blending collection of absorbing, interconnected historical and biographical essays. Anchoring these pieces is the idea of the titular "slaveroad," the through line of American history that began with the slave trade and continues today in many insidious forms. As he states in the introduction, "Slavery is kept alive by old and new suffering generation after generation. Suffering and pain passed on as riches are passed on by the rich to the rich." In standout sections about figures like William Henry Sheppard, an early African American missionary in Ghana, and his long-suffering wife, Lucy, alongside quick but devastating sections, like one about the courage of graffiti artists, "Lions and Taggers," Wideman illustrates the many ways in which the sins and tragedies of the past continue to proliferate. Through a mixture of fiction and nonfiction and in the classic ruminative, stream of consciousness style that his readers have grown to expect, Wideman invites us into deep reflection about the inextricable link between the past and the present. Wideman's insightful inquiries will appeal to fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Wideman (Look for Me and I'll Be Gone) meditates on the enduring effects of slavery in this heartfelt collection of sketches about historical figures and personal stories centered on his brother's release from prison. In "Who Is Sheppard," the narrator, a stand-in for Wideman, reflects on William Henry Sheppard, a Black Presbyterian missionary who traveled from the U.S. to Africa in the late 1800s, imagining Sheppard's attempt to fathom the number of bodies like his that crossed the ocean in the other direction on the "slaveroad." "Who Is Rebekah" portrays Moravian missionary Rebekah Protten, who ministers to enslaved people on a plantation on St. Thomas. In "Staring," Wideman looks back on his teaching career, focusing on the regret he feels for failing to connect with a Black student who went on to become a successful poet ("Neither of us chose to reveal much suffering to the other"). "Penn Station" recounts Wideman's reunion with his brother, newly released from prison: "arms wrapped around my brother's body, how easy it had been to forget forty-four years." Though the digressive prose stalls in places, there are gems of wisdom sprinkled throughout: "Anyway, writing, like all art, is doomed to fail, isn't it?" Wideman writes in "Joe Wood," a story about a promising Black writer who disappeared during a hiking trip in 1999. Despite some rough patches, Wideman's probing mind shines through. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A distinguished author riffs on his life and the Black experience. A prolific, much-honored writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Wideman has a substantial following who will applaud this latest work. The opening pages, which describe his elder son's struggle to attend his dying mother, Wideman's ex-wife, and his younger son's long imprisonment, may suggest a straightforward autobiography to come, but the author's musings on what this book might be called ("poetry, novel, history, fiction, biography, holy writ, etc.") hint that what follows is not journalism but high literature. Almost immediately, Wideman rewinds the clock to introduce characters who may be but probably aren't his ancestors: Rebekah, servant or slave of a wealthy religious southern couple who is sexually used by the husband and brutally beaten and crippled by the wife. A major figure is William Henry Sheppard, a Black Virginia-born American missionary sent to an outpost on the Congo River in 1890 "about the same time Joseph Conrad had passed through." Wideman's Sheppard does not ignore the white colonial abuse that Conrad recorded, but mostly he treasures the acceptance he enjoys in an all-Black society, so much so that he betrays his wife. Although Sheppard died in 1934, Wideman cannot stop thinking of parallels in their lives. Wideman's writing in this and earlier works has been described as experimental, mixing sentence fragments with page-long sentences, eschewing punctuation and employing stream-of-consciousness techniques that owe more to James Joyce than to Toni Morrison. Readers with a few college literature courses under their belts will have an easier time. Less a memoir than a passionate prose poem. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
