IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:

Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America
by Clay Risen
Scribner, 2025

[Publication date: March 18, 2025]

As relevant as it is comprehensive, Red Scare tells the story of McCarthyism and the Red Scare—based in part on newly declassified sources—by an award-winning writer of history and New York Times reporter.

The film Oppenheimer has awakened interest in this vital period of American history. Now, for the first time in a generation, Red Scare presents a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II. The cultural phenomenon, most often referred to as McCarthyism, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, coupled with the terrifying onset of the Cold War. This defining moment in American history, unlike any that preceded it, was marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria. Drawing upon newly declassified documents, journalist Clay Risen recounts how politicians like Joseph McCarthy, with the help of an extended network of other government officials and organizations, systematically ruined thousands of lives in their deluded pursuit of alleged Communist conspiracies.

Beginning with the origins of the era after WWI through to its conclusion in 1957, Risen brings to life the politics, patriotism, opportunism, courage, and delirium of those years through the lives and experiences of a cast of towering historical figures, including President Eisenhower, Roy Cohn, Paul Robeson, Robert Oppenheimer, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Richard Nixon, and many more individuals known and unknown. Red Scare takes us beyond the familiar story of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists to a fuller understanding of what the country went through at a time of moral questioning and perceived threat from the left, and what we were capable of doing to each other as a result.

An urgent, accessible, and important history, Red Scare reveals an all-too-familiar pattern of illiberal conspiracy-mongering and political and cultural backlash that speaks directly to the antagonism and divisiveness of our contemporary moment. 

REVIEWS: 

"As Clay Risen’s meaty and powerfully relevant new book, Red Scare, makes clear, our own times are ringing with echoes of the clamorous battles of mid-20th-century McCarthyism…Risen tells his story with a punch and an economy that are at times almost Hemingwayesque… Some of Risen’s scenes are so vivid that you can almost feel yourself sweating along with the witnesses in the poorly air-conditioned committee room… Red Scare resonates because it speaks so directly to our current quandary."

—The New York Times Book Review

"[A] thorough, impassioned but even-handed study of Cold War hysteria in the U.S… Detailed, tension-packed…chronicles how national hysteria can take on a life of its own, like a deadly fever dream that overtakes the public consciousness."

—The LA Times

"Lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible...[Red Scare] describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end."

—The New Yorker

"Scarily relevant...transports readers back to the witch hunts of the early 1950s...vividly recalls an era that may feel all-too-familiar."

—The Boston Globe

"Risen’s fluent narrative…goes beyond the familiar Hollywood blacklists to reveal how conspiracy stories touched educators and people in various civil rights movements and led to the 'canceling' of individuals in business, government, and any sphere influential to the prevailing culture.”

—Foreign Affairs

"In his meticulous and mesmerizing history Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, Clay Risen traces the cultural, political, and social forces that gave rise to McCarthy in 1950 and to his fall in 1954 … By deftly toggling between the personal and national, Risen gives us a riveting and disquieting portrayal of our nation’s recent past and, perhaps, its immediate future."

—Forward

“A sweeping history of the campaign to suppress liberal dissent via blacklisting and harassment…An exemplary work of political and cultural history that invites a gimlet-eyed look at our own time.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Risen’s feverish prose perfectly captures the chaos of McCarthyism, from the book bans to the power grabs to the lives forever altered in the scuffle...In examining this turbulent era from the vantage of our own charged moment, Risen goes beyond the spectacle to arrive at the gritty center. Frightening yet thoroughly affecting, Red Scare is propulsive history at its most striking."

—Booklist (starred review)

"The central drama of the Red Scare played, writes Clay Risen, like 'a tragedy, a thriller, a Christian morality play, even a dark comedy.' In his hands those months also read like a fast-paced detective story, of the most chilling variety. A riveting, resonant account of how cultural and political anxieties combined to power a sort of ritual cleansing, as a group of hardened conservatives lost their heads and a country lost its way."

—Stacy Schiff, author of The Witches and The Revolutionary

"I thought I had read basically everything written on McCarthyism and the scars it left on America, but Clay Risen’s deep, gorgeous new history is as revelatory to me as it is moving. This is political history, yes, but also a lyrical and sensitive tolling of what this monstrous type of politics does to the human beings in its way. Today especially, we need much more careful and important public history like Red Scare—bravo."

—Rachel Maddow, author of Prequel

"What a marvelous book! The story of America’s postwar Red Scare has lost none of its historical importance or contemporary resonance, and Risen brings it beautifully to life in this deeply researched, incisive, and elegantly written work. The implications for today are all too clear."
—Fredrik Logevall, author of JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956

"In a narrative both eloquent and incisive, Clay Risen has produced the most complete history of the Red Scare that has ever been written. His judgments about the characters—both famous and obscure—who mattered in this low, dishonest era are always persuasive. While a delight to read, the book explains why the conspiratorial style of politics that dominated America 75 years ago is with us still."
—Michael Kazin, author of What It Takes to Win: A History of the Democratic Party

"[A] sweeping portrait of a nightmare moment when America lost its faith in itself is a vivid reminder of what happens when we trade our founding ideals for easy answers and false security. It’s a troubling parable for our own perilous times."
—Todd S. Purdum, author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

"Clay Risen has written a gripping genealogy of the McCarthyist right and the Red Scare...American history [that] continue[s] to echo down to the present."

— Molly Jong-Fast, Vanity Fair, special correspondent

"Risen has written a fast paced morality tale for our troubled times. Narrative non-fiction at its page turning best, Red Scare is aflashing red light warning us of just howprecarious our democracy is—and how we might safeguard it." —Kati Marton, author of The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel and True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy

 

ABOUT  THE AUTHOR:

 

Clay Risen, a reporter and editor at The New York Times, is the author of The Crowded Hour, a New York Times Notable Book of 2019 and a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Prize in Military History. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and a fellow at the Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the author of two other acclaimed books on American history, A Nation on Fire and The Bill of the Century, as well as his most recent book on McCarthyism, Red Scare. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two young children.

Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
by Eve L. Ewing
One World, 2025

 

[Publication date:  February 11, 2025]

 

  

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A fascinating and eye-opening look at how American schools have helped build and reinforce an infrastructure of racial inequality . . . a must-read for every American parent and educator.”—Esquire

“Though the argument of this book is bleak, it illuminates a path for a more just future that is nothing short of dazzling.”—Oprah Daily

“This book will transform the way you see this country.”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.

In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to “civilize” Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution that would fortify the country’s racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources.

By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.

REVIEWS:

 

“[Eve L. Ewing] contends that the American education system has been deeply shaped by systemic prejudice. . . . She challenges readers to confront this uncomfortable truth so they can reimagine what schools could be.”—Chicago magazine

“This stark critique of America’s schools anchors our current educational system in eighteenth-century ideas about race and intelligence. Tracing a line from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia through Jim Crow to present-day policies on housing, zoning, and standardized testing, Ewing argues that this system was always intended to operate differently for different people.”—The New Yorker

“Original Sins focuses on . . . how schools were designed not to unlock opportunity but to control Black and Native children, [to] enforce inequality, and to build the basic infrastructure of America’s racial and economic hierarchy.”—The Ink

“The idea of self-betterment through education has been a part of America’s alleged meritocracy since forever, but here, Ewing lays out here how it’s also always been a lie. For Black and Native students, it’s been a way to erase culture and ‘civilize.’”—Book Riot

“Ewing makes a convincing argument through her analysis and unparalleled storytelling that unless education in the United States is radically reconsidered, schools will simply continue to maintain the legacy of inequality at the core of the nation.”—Shelf Awareness

“In Original Sins, she makes clear how our country’s schools have intentionally configured the contemporary landscape of inequality.”—Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed

“The clearest most comprehensive answer to ‘How did all this happen?’ I’ve read.”—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

“A summons to collective struggle and imagining where dreams, memories, and care are woven together as the building blocks of a new vision of ‘schools for us.’”—Sandy Grande, author of Red Pedagogy

“By reckoning with the violent, dehumanizing history of Black and Indigenous schooling, Ewing finds in the resistance of students and renegade teachers a path toward a life-affirming education.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

“Original Sins is a commitment to being true about the past in order to truly have a future. Fiercely hopeful, this is a book you will read, and then want everyone in your life to read—a book to be read in community.”—Eve Tuck, co-editor of Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education

“Ewing invites readers to consider the power of education toward liberation—schools as collective sites where we can dream and grow our knowledge to building new worlds based on ethical relationships of care.”—Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, author of As We Have Always Done

“Eve L. Ewing lays the bare the core project of dispossession and race-making in American education and statecraft.”—Audra Simpson, author of Mohawk Interruptus

“Poet, sociologist, and cultural organizer Ewing again turns her incisive, scholarly eye to education, racism, and American society.”—Booklist, starred review

“A troubling and eye-opening examination of the foundational role educators played in developing America’s racial hierarchy.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review 

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 

Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, and cultural organizer from Chicago. She is the award-winning author of four books: Electric Arches, 1919, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, and Maya and the Robot. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks and has written several projects for Marvel Comics. Ewing is an associate professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other venues.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1
Jefferson’s Ghost

How does it feel to be a problem?

W. E. B. Du Bois famously posed this haunting question in 1903, in his classic work The Souls of Black Folk. I think of it often, especially whenever I encounter one particular line from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia: “Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.”

It’s stinging in its candor. It strikes me every time, sending me spinning through my own vignettes of the Black poets who set a course for my thriving. In eighth grade, my class took a three-day trip to Washington, D.C., my first time traveling without my family. We visited Monticello. No one brought up the poetry line. I would go through elementary school, high school, college, and my first master’s degree, and no one would ever bring it up. Parts of Jefferson’s legacy were omnipresent in my experience of schooling, and other parts were completely absent.

Before we dive into the three pillars of racism that I described in the introduction, I want to spend some time thinking about Jefferson as a titanic figure in American culture and the impact of his legacy on how we think about racial hierarchy in the United States; we’ll then talk about how this vision has shaped the purposes of schooling along racial lines.

There’s nothing coincidental about how Jefferson does and does not show up in schools and in curricula, or the fact that roughly half of U.S. states have schools named “Thomas Jefferson” (seventy-one total, more than schools named “Abraham Lincoln”). Jefferson’s beliefs about Black and Native people, and the ways he enacted those beliefs as a leader of singular magnitude, laid a cornerstone for the edifice of American racial hierarchy and the contours of American schooling in a distinct way. In the era of Jefferson, Black and Native peoples on Turtle Island posed a mighty problem for the shapers of the new republic. They were an existential threat. And in his writings, Jefferson aimed to tackle that threat through rhetorical moves that would frame the nation and its schools for years to come.

Those who celebrate Jefferson have struggled to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable ideas that he put forth into the world: On the one hand, he is viewed as the esteemed father of the Declaration of Independence, the champion of the Bill of Rights and the liberties we hold dear. On the other hand, he held enslaved people as property, and his ideas and policies were crucial in establishing the dogma of Black and Native inferiority. For many people in the United States, faced with the contradiction of Jefferson as a paragon of rational thought who also believed in the inhumanity of Black and Native peoples, Jefferson the erudite intellectual has seemingly won out. In our collective consciousness, the ways Jefferson grievously harmed Black and Native people don’t really matter—he still gets to be the “Sage of Monticello,” representing the zenith of gentlemanly intellect, statesmanship, creativity, and genteel society.

The pedestal of the U.S. presidency is widely understood to represent leadership, moral fortitude, and strength of will. That’s why people love to tell kids they could grow up to be president someday if they work hard enough. But even among presidents, Thomas Jefferson is considered exceptional for his intelligence. In 2006, Dean Keith Simonton, distinguished professor of psychology at UC Davis, published a peer-reviewed journal article purporting to determine the IQ of forty-two American presidents. Simonton declared Jefferson to be the second-most intelligent president, after John Quincy Adams. At a 1962 dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners, John F. Kennedy quipped, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. Someone once said that Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman of thirty-two who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet.”

Jefferson retains a powerful image in the American consciousness, still lauded not only as the progenitor of our democracy but also as an emblem of intellectual excellence. However, two of Jefferson’s key interventions in our country laid the groundwork for anti-Black and anti-Native ways of viewing the world, both inside schools and beyond their corridors.

Notes on the State of Virginia is the only full-length book Jefferson ever authored. In a definitive edited version of the text, historian William Peden called it the “best single statement of Jefferson’s principles, the best reflection of his wide-ranging tastes and talents. It is, in short, an American classic,” “unique in American literary history,” and “probably the most important scientific and political book written by an American before 1785.” While the Declaration of Independence is certainly the document for which Jefferson is best known, the Notes were his magnum opus. The text is massive in scope, with twenty-three chapters addressing topics vast in their scale and variety. Jefferson wrote of Virginia’s waterways, its mountain ranges, its militias, its legal system, its fiscal system of income and expenses.

And he wrote of its people.

Historian Arica L. Coleman has posited that the Notes “may well contain the most disparaging remarks regarding people of African descent ever written.” When I first read these words, I was startled, thinking immediately of all the hateful and vulgar words I have seen deployed against Black people. The more I thought about it, though, the more I had to concede that Coleman may be right. Jefferson’s writings are cloaked in civility and the artful turn of phrase; the aptitude for language that has made him a beloved cultural figure obscures the true violence of what he is saying. Jefferson described Black people’s faces as having an “eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race.”

He continues:

They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites . . . They seem to require less sleep. A black after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of fore-thought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.

Such ideas would be hurtful enough if they were merely bigoted perspectives coming from an idly opining individual. But the Notes represent something on a much grander scale. Jefferson was a son of the Enlightenment, a period characterized by efforts to systematically describe the order of the observable world. The work reflected his character as someone prone to obsessive enumeration, botanical experiments, meteorological observations, and dutiful record keeping. He viewed naming, numbering, sorting, and categorizing as natural strengths to which he was called in life. Notes on the State of Virginia was not only a treatise espousing Jefferson’s political opinions. It was his attempt to organize the world.

In the Notes, Jefferson chastises himself and his peers for the fact that “though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history.” He argues that such study is imperative. Shortly thereafter, he introduces his plan for a system of education to best serve the nation: Every county in Virginia should be divided into school districts. Each year, an expert would choose a brilliant boy whose parents were poor and send him forward for further schooling, to be paid for collectively. “By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually,” Jefferson explained.

 

Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity
by Cedric de Leon
University of California Press, 2025

 

[Publication date:  April 15, 2025]

 

Revealing the central role of Black activists in spurring interracial solidarity in the US labor movement.

Most accounts of interracial solidarity focus on white union activists. In Freedom Train, Cedric de Leon, a former organizer and elected leader in the US labor movement, argues that we can't comprehend the history of workers' triumphs in the United States without investigating the role of Black liberation. This book shows that, from the early twentieth century to the years immediately following the March on Washington and beyond, independent Black labor organizations have pushed the white labor movement toward a fierce and effective interracial solidarity.

Drawing on the minutes, correspondence, and speeches of Black labor activists and organizations from 1917 to 1968, de Leon reveals that Black people have been the most ardent and consistent proponents of racial inclusion, leadership representation, and programs linking economic and racial justice. He also demonstrates how conflict and consensus among Black labor groups fueled the fight for solidarity, as different factions split and consolidated to form successive and sometimes competing Black labor organizations. Freedom Train centers the contributions of Black people to the multiracial unions we have today and demonstrates that internal conflict can be a source of strategic innovation and social movement success.


REVIEWS:


"Freedom Train is a timely contribution to our understanding of the role of Black labor activism in advancing the movement for racial and economic justice. Cedric de Leon complicates the popular narrative of a 'golden age' of labor organizing centered on the rise of the AFL-CIO. He demonstrates instead that independent Black labor organizing—beginning with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the African Blood Brotherhood in the 1920s—was a key driver of the push for racial justice in the labor movement. As Black elites rise to higher positions of mainstream electoral power, Freedom Train provides lessons in how to ensure that they are accountable to the Black working class."—Steven Pitts, cofounder of the National Black Worker Center

"De Leon does what few historians have in centering the Black worker as a player both in the politics of the Black Freedom Movement and in organized labor. This is a remarkable work and one that will be of critical importance to trade unionists and Black freedom activists."—Bill Fletcher Jr., activist, coauthor of Solidarity Divided, and author of "They're Bankrupting Us!": And Twenty Other Myths about Unions

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Cedric de Leon is Professor of Sociology and Labor Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
by Omar El Akkad
Alfred A. Knopf, 2025

 

[Publication date:  February 25, 2025]

 

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values

"[A] bracing memoir and manifesto."—The New York Times

“I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it.”—Tommy Orange, bestselling author of Wandering Stars and There There

On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.

As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.

REVIEWS: 

 

"It is difficult to understand the nature of a true rupture while it is still tearing through the fabric of our world. Yet that is precisely what Omar El Akkad has accomplished, putting broken heart and shredded illusions into words with tremendous insight, skill and courage. A unique and urgently needed book." —Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger

"[A] bracing memoir and manifesto.... With precision and passion, [El Akkad] compels readers to close the emotional distance between 'us' and 'them' and to consider the immense suffering of civilians with renewed urgency."—The New York Times

“A bracing case for empathy....What would it take to render a horror “over there” equally real to one “over here?” How do we lie to ourselves so convincingly, and what is the cost of those lies? These questions burn and throb with a haunting clarity [in One Day]....El Akkad is...a moral meteorologist....It reminds me of a story I heard once, about the late Toronto filmmaker Charles Officer, who was asked why he makes films that preach to the choir. It is because the choir must be fortified, he answered. El Akkad is tending to an exhausted choir, so that its song may ring clear.”—Elamin Abdelmahmoud, The Washington Post

"Fiercely agonized.... [Omar El Akkad's] book is a distraught but eloquent cry against our tolerance for other people’s calamities."—Fintan O’Toole, The New York Times Book Review (cover)

"Powerful.... compelling....haunting."—Sean O’Hagan, The Guardian Observer

"A thoughtful, heartfelt, and ultimately heartbroken missive from an immigrant to his second home—a country whose vaunted values, never fulfilled, now seem almost a mockery. Echoing Baldwin, El Akkad writes from anger and love."—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

“Affecting...Wherever we go, El Akkad is correct that we must start with refusal, if only the refusal to look away.”—JewishCurrents

"Exceptionally powerful, as a howl of rage and grief against the status quo must be.... This is a book that many will take issue with, and most will find uncomfortable, which makes it even more important. Discomfort, as he points out, is a luxury."—Alex Clark, Financial Times

"One Day is powerful, angry, but always compelling in its moral logic, and damn hard to put down.... by the end my heart was drumming.... For me it was cathartic, almost spiritual....It is an important book, a must-read"—Dina Nayeri, The Guardian

"A powerful and deeply disturbing book....It took courage to write One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It takes courage too, to read it. Because El Akkad is right." —Lawrence Hill, The Globe and Mail

"This book is a howl from the heart of our age. I struggle to find more precise wording that might capture its ferocious, fracturing rage, as it seeks to describe the indescribable, make coherent an increasingly incoherent world.”—Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North

“I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. Doom and gloom and unspeakable horror abound and overwhelm these days, but it remains important to understand what we already know is happening now and how it will be understood in the future. It helps when we feel helpless to give our time and attention, our hearts and consideration to a voice like this, a book like this, from our particular time and for it. There is so much power in language here, where it is difficult to find words, such heart in a world that feels has lost its way. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it. I honestly don’t know how you could.”—Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars

"If you cannot fathom the scale and savagery of the genocide against the Palestinian people, if you feel the world is smashed off its axis and you feel profoundly alone, profoundly mad, then read this clear, elegant and devastatingly truthful account of why you are not mad, and not alone; read this shatteringly honest book by a great writer who also cannot reconcile those things, but is—on behalf of us all, and with his whole soul—trying." —Max Porter, author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

"One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This wants us to answer its questions with the greatest possible honesty, and to embrace those answers as our true companions. What it gives us is nothing less than lionhearted, dauntless, unembellished love."—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning

"[A] fierce, anguished indictment of Western hypocritical indifference towards Israel's destruction of Gaza.... Terrifying, shameful, and necessary testimony."—Booklist, starred review ⭐

"I received an advanced copy of Omar El Akkad’s brilliant book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. I will read anything Omar El Akkad ever writes. This book is a reckoning. The lie that the West is founded upon—from the beginning—blooms in blood on the pages. This book is a love story in the face of genocide—a love born between the very peoples we have always colonized and killed as if they are the raw material of building nations. What a furious, perfect heart it took to stare into the abyss we call being human and emerge with a revolution song."—Lidia Yuknavitch, The Millions

“Omar El Akkad’s book is riveting in its honesty. I found it to be a brilliant mosaic of heartfelt reflections on the sad state of the world, one that dared to end in hope." – Raja Shehadeh, author of We Could Have Been Friends and Palestinian Walks

"Never again starts with not dehumanising the Other. No one, ever. Thank you @omarelakkad for putting this into words."—Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, via X

"I feel inadequate to describe a book like this with the right superlatives—I don't want to reduce the book down to one thing in doing so... but I hope Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This will find a large audience."—Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach Trilogy

“El Akkad...state[s] that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human....Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know.... A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy."—Kirkus Reviews

“Part elegy, part rallying cry, this magnificent book should, and will, be required reading for future generations trying to reckon with one of humanity’s darkest chapters.”—Téa Obreht, author of The Morningside

“A startling, shocking, beautiful and essential book. It shook me up.”—Brian Eno

“Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, lays bare and eviscerates the genocidal logics of fascism and liberalism. Here, language does what we need it to do: it clarifies, it condemns, it names, it grieves. Here, too, is a lexicon for what might survive this. Devastating and scathing; you will want to read, will want to have read, this book.”—Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

“Is this the most urgent book you can read right now? Yes, it is.
Is this the most moral book you can read right now? It sure is.
Is this the most eye-opening book right now? Yep.
Is this the most needed book for our times? Absolutely.”
—Rabih Alameddine, author of The Wrong End of the Telescope

“In this powerful indictment of Western complicity in the genocide of Palestinians, Omar El Akkad asks: how are we supposed to go on living in this world? He looks for his answer to the worlds colonized and oppressed, who have always lived according to a love that ‘cannot be acknowledged by the empire because it’s a people’s love for one another.”—Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost

“One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This strikes with the clarifying force of an angel. By turns furiously troubled and achingly introspective, El Akkad sets fire to the devourous genocidal abyss we call a civilization and all the billion mendacities that sustain it. A landmark of truth-telling and moral courage, One Day is the truest most necessary book you will ever read.”—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“An extraordinary, essential work of fury and humanity, as well as a damning indictment of Western hypocrisy and institutional malignity. I cannot conceive of a more important book to read right now, or a more incisive and elegant articulation of this dark time. Every page contains a sentence or a paragraph I wanted to tear out and nail to the wall. I wish I could send a copy of El Akkad’s moral call to arms to every person in America, every person in the West—the outraged and the apathetic alike”—Dan Sheehan, author of Restless Souls

“Omar El Akkad has produced something close to impossible with this elegiac and deeply personal book. With barely contained fury at the depths of Western hypocrisy, El Akkad manages to speak not just for himself but for all of us in the face of Israel’s unspeakable violence against the Palestinians.”—Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem

“El Akkad's propulsive and damning indictment of Western violence and sanctimony in Palestine and beyond reads as a cry from the heart. He carefully dissects what it means to be an immigrant writing about the brutality of a system he has chosen to be part of and all the ensuing psychological harm that follows.”—Nadifa Mohamed, author of The Fortune Men

“Omar El Akkad’s devastating new book lays bare the deliberately distorted twists of language and logic that have allowed us to sustain a politics of extermination. The care, grief, anger and intimacy that Akkad brings to every page implicates all of us and is a testament to the moral and intellectual courage that make this desperately needed book absolutely necessary.”—Dinaw Mengestu, author of Someone Like Us 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 

OMAR EL AKKAD is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His books have been translated into thirteen languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of one hundred novels that shaped our world.

Malcolm Before X
by Patrick Parr
University of Massachusetts Press,  2024

 

[Publication date:  December 1, 2024]

 

   

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2024
A Spectator Best Book of the Year
Finalist for the 2025 ASALH Book Prize

Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of the prison years of civil rights icon Malcolm X.

In February 1946, when 20-year-old Malcolm Little was sentenced to eight to ten years in a maximum-security prison, he was a petty criminal and street hustler in Boston. By the time he was paroled in August 1952, he had transformed into a voracious reader, joined the Black Muslims, and was poised to become Malcolm X, one of the most prominent and important intellectuals of the civil rights era. While scholars and commentators have exhaustively detailed, analyzed, and debated Malcolm X’s post-prison life, they have not explored these six and a half transformative years in any depth.

Paying particular attention to his time in prison, Patrick Parr’s Malcolm Before X provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking examination of the first twenty-seven years of Malcolm X’s life (1925–1965). Parr traces Malcolm’s African lineage, explores his complicated childhood in the Midwest, and follows him as he moves east to live with his sister Ella in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, where he is convicted of burglary and sentenced.

Parr utilizes a trove of previously overlooked documents that include prison files and prison newspapers to immerse the reader into the unique cultures—at times brutal and at times instructional—of Charlestown State Prison, the Concord Reformatory, and the Norfolk Prison Colony. It was at these institutions that Malcolm devoured books, composed poetry, boxed, debated, and joined the Nation of Islam, changing the course of his life and setting the stage for a decade of antiracist activism that would fundamentally reshape American culture.

In this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, the inspiring story of how Malcolm Little became Malcolm X is finally told.  

REVIEWS:

"Parr has written the definitive story of the youth and early adulthood of one of the most dazzling and controversial civil rights leaders in American history."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"This first-rate biography looks at. . . one of the great conversion stories of modern history: a young man mired in crime raises himself up and, through self-discipline, becomes an explosive spokesperson for Black Americans."—Library Journal, starred review

"Ambitious, eye opening...Parr's book is a portrait of growth." - Martin Pengelly, The Guardian

"Parr's Malcolm Before X is an important addition to the literature on both black nationalism and the US criminal justice system...Thoroughly researched and crisply written, Parr's work provides the most complete examination yet of Malcolm's prison years." - Theodore Hamm, Jacobin

"Excerpts [from Malcolm X's autobiography] are supplemented with accounts from his family and friends, providing external perspectives that at times conflict with his own. The multiple accounts are managed well, adding layers and widening the scope of the narrative."—Foreword Reviews

"Patrick Parr's Malcolm Before X is a breathtaking act of intellectual reconstruction and a sublime literary achievement. Parr's book excavates the life changing, yet woefully underappreciated, six and a half years that Malcolm spent in prison, and masterfully probes the roots of his traumatic childhood and troubled young adulthood. Malcolm Before X for the first time puts us fully in touch with the contradictory yet constitutive forces that shaped one of the monumental lives of the twentieth century."—Michael Eric Dyson, author of Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X

"Malcolm Before X is strikingly original. Parr's prodigious research gives us the most richly documented book about Malcolm's early life that we will ever have. His account of how a good prison library can spark a personal transformation should resonate widely. A superb achievement."—David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross and Rising Star

"I have known Patrick Parr since 2019. The original research he shared with me was extremely helpful in writing one of my own books, The Awakening of Malcolm X. I believe Patrick's new book is an important addition to the story of my father's life."—Ilyasah Shabazz, author of Growing Up X: A Memoir by the Daughter of Malcolm X

"Patrick Parr has managed an extraordinary feat. In telling the story of Malcolm Little the child, the student, the burglar, the prisoner, he has helped us to more fully understand Malcolm X the orator, the leader, the radical thinker. Parr has unearthed remarkable documentary sources to tell the gripping and important story of the shaping of a great mind."—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of King: A Life

"Patrick Parr's meticulously researched book gives us the most detailed account yet of this historic transformation—and offers lessons for today about the life-changing potential of prison libraries and educational programs."—Mark Whitaker, author of Saying It Loud: 1966-The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement

"More than any other previous biography of Malcolm X that I have read, in Malcolm Before X, Patrick Parr delivers an air-tight, well documented chronology of the well-known episodes in Malcolm's early life combined with a compelling, revelatory portrait of the six and a half transformative years he spent in prison."—Abdur-Rahman Muhammad is a scholar, historian, journalist, writer, activist, and authority on the life and legacy of Malcolm X

"Patrick Parr has produced an extraordinary act of historical research and recovery. By taking Malcolm X's prison years seriously, Parr helps to restore the human being behind the legend. —Peniel Joseph, author of The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century 

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 

Patrick Parr is professor of English at Lakeland University Japan. He is author of The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Politico, USA Today, and The American Prospect. To learn more about the author, visit patrickparr.com.