We Were Eight Years in Power
2017
- politics and government
- race relations
- biography & autobiography / personal memoirs
- political science / american government / executive branch
- african american authors
- social science / discrimination & race relations
- social conditions
- african americans
- political culture
- united states, politics and government, 2009-2017
The story
In these "urgently relevant essays," the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me "reflects on race, Barack Obama's presidency and its jarring aftermath"*--including the election of Donald Trump
What it’s like
Dense, essayistic prose with a measured, searching voice, the sentences often long and argued, circling back to personal memory and small domestic detail before widening into history. Reading it feels like sitting with a thoughtful friend who has been up late thinking hard, a steady, lamp-lit intimacy rather than a rush of argument. The register is grave but never shrill: it moves through hope, disappointment and a slow-dawning unease, with the 2009 to 2017 span tracing a sort of sunrise-to-dusk arc across its pages. Pacing is deliberate, each essay a self-contained walk through a question, so it suits a quiet Sunday, a long train ride, or a stretch of evenings when you want to think rather than be entertained. It contains no graphic violence, though it discusses police brutality, racist violence and political cruelty directly and with real weight. For readers of political history and race in America who want an unhurried, personal and unsentimental account of the Obama years and what followed.
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