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Pantheon
October 2010
On Sale: September 21, 2010
208 pages
ISBN: 0307378764
EAN: 9780307378767
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
In the wake of talk of a “postracial” America upon Barack
Obama’s ascension as president of the United States, Michele
Norris, cohost of National Public Radio’s flagship program
All Things Considered, set out to write, through original
reporting, a book about “the hidden conversation” on race
that is unfolding nationwide. She would, she thought, base
her book on the frank disclosures of others on the subject,
but she was soon disabused of her presumption when forced to
confront the fact that “the conversation” in her own family
had not been forthright.
Norris unearthed painful family secrets that compelled her
to question her own self-understanding: from her father’s
shooting by a Birmingham police officer weeks after his
discharge from the navy at the conclusion of World War II to
her maternal grandmother’s peddling pancake mix as an
itinerant Aunt Jemima to white farm women in the Midwest. In
what became a profoundly personal and bracing journey into
her family’s past, Norris traveled from her childhood home
in Minneapolis to her ancestral roots in the Deep South to
explore the reasons for the “things left unsaid” by her
father and mother when she was growing up, the better to
come to terms with her own identity. Along the way she
discovered how her character was forged by both revelation
and silence.
Extraordinary for Norris’s candor in examining her own
racial legacy and what it means to be an American, The Grace
of Silence is also informed by rigorous research in its
evocation of time and place, scores of interviews with
ordinary folk, and wise observations about evolving
attitudes, at once encouraging and disturbing, toward race
in America today. For its particularity and universality, it
is powerfully moving, a tour de force.
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