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Pantheon
September 2015
On Sale: September 8, 2015
256 pages
ISBN: 0307378454
EAN: 9780307378453
Kindle: B00R04MDIQ
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiacβhere is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the authorβs rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both.
Born in upper-crust black Chicagoβher father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nationβs oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialiteβMargo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, βa small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.β
Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical momentsβthe civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial AmericaβJefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heart-wrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance.
 Media BuzzFresh Air - NPR - September 8, 2015
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