moving to outside.ofa.dog reviewed March: Book One by John Lewis (March, Book One)
Review of 'March' on 'LibraryThing'
5 stars
Total cliche, but I read this over the MLK Day long weekend, prompted in part by the President-Elect foolishly and thin-skinnedly attacking John Lewis. But I had been meaning to read this for a while...
Anyway, it's an important story well told. For me it filled in some gaps in knowledge (from across the pond our curriculum about this era pretty much stops at MLK and Malcolm X), and made a lot of the background feel more real. There's something about the pettiness of the colour line that's been really getting to me lately--all these things that would have been so easy for whites to concede and make black peoples' lives materially so much harder--and this book captures that well. It also humanises some of the key figures who I'm use to hearing discussed in a rather hagiographic way; of course John Lewis himself the most of all, and I …
Total cliche, but I read this over the MLK Day long weekend, prompted in part by the President-Elect foolishly and thin-skinnedly attacking John Lewis. But I had been meaning to read this for a while...
Anyway, it's an important story well told. For me it filled in some gaps in knowledge (from across the pond our curriculum about this era pretty much stops at MLK and Malcolm X), and made a lot of the background feel more real. There's something about the pettiness of the colour line that's been really getting to me lately--all these things that would have been so easy for whites to concede and make black peoples' lives materially so much harder--and this book captures that well. It also humanises some of the key figures who I'm use to hearing discussed in a rather hagiographic way; of course John Lewis himself the most of all, and I love the digression about him preaching to the chickens.
