Books: Summer Reading

The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 2021)—Rutgers president Jonathan Scott Holloway, a scholar of post-emancipation America, provides a succinct introduction to African American history from the arrival of Africans in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. He also invites readers to consider exactly what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being.

How Beautiful We Were (Random House, 2021)—Alumna Imbolo Mbue is back with her second novel, set in a fictional African village where an American oil company is polluting the land, air, and water; harming children; and leading residents to fight back. Mbue DC’01, who grew up in Cameroon, penned her debut novel, Behold the Dreamers (Random House, 2016), which won the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award.

In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (Abrams Press, 2021)—Salamishah Tillet, Henry Rutgers Professor of African American and African Studies at Rutgers University–Newark, braids cultural criticism, history, and memoir to evaluate the legacy of the 1982 novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker, who won the National Book Award and became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. Later made into a popular movie and theatrical productions, the coming-of-age story of Celie initially garnered as much criticism as praise, prompting debates about gender, race, language, and sexual violence.

Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America (University of Chicago Press, 2020)—Wendy A. Woloson, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University–Camden, looks into the history of knickknacks, novelty goods, mass-produced collectibles, and other assorted bric-a-brac, inquiring why as individuals and as a society we desire these things we don’t really need as she assesses the complexity of our commodity culture. The book was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award in the category of criticism.