100 books like The Fire Next Time

I first read this many years ago and it has stayed with me. Every so often, I return to it in order to immerse myself in its wonderful prose and insights. It combines travelogue with biography, detective work with a probing inner exploration and is both an account of a physical journey and a remap of the writer’s imagination. He begins with his homage to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey and describes his own trek over the Cevennes. He starts out with the idea that he will be a poet and finishes his walk having been led "far away into the undiscovered land of other’s men and women’s lives. It led towards biography."

It is the turning point of his life and for the remainder of the book – as he hunts down his subjects which include Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Gerard de Nerval, and Gautier – he goes… show more.

As I drove through the South researching my guidebook to civil rights sites, my back seat was filled with books. Atop the pile was Taylor Branch’s magisterial three-volume history – America in the King Years 1954-1968: Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge.

Though encyclopedic, Branch’s story-telling is riveting—weaving together personalities, legalities, strategies, and geography in a way that made me feel as if I were there witnessing history as it was made. Taylor’s detail, reflecting a journalist’s quest for who, what, where, when, how, and why, showed me that these stories could best be told, understood, and felt where they happened.

It was Hemingway’s Boat, with its discursive Shandean style, that set the tone for my book. It was the only way I knew to tell a story that was so uniquely decentralized, so rollickingly exploratory, but I couldn’t begin to rival Paul Hendrickson, who remains the master of the tangential truth, digging deeper into the soul of the man than any Hemingway biography I have ever read – by focusing on his boat. At one point in my Phillips biography, after wandering off-course for 60 pages and finally coming back to the narrative moment I had abandoned, I wrote, “For all of my faith in extended digression I hope I haven’t stretched the limits of reader patience too much by now. Let me just pick up the thread.” But this is nothing compared to Paul Hendrickson’s masterful command of seemingly structureless story-telling, the non-fiction equivalent of some of Alice… show more.

Chuck Berry: The Autobiography is a primary clue to the Inner Chuck, if not the Facts of Chuck, an indisputable masterpiece, witty, elegant, and revealing, and (or perhaps but) ultimately elusive. Unlike so many music (and other) autobiographies, every word of this one was written by its author in a web of elegant, intricate connections that are both coded and transparent. Very much like the songs.

Of all Dr. King’s books (many of which I helped assemble, edit, and/or find publishing for), his last seems to strike at the heart of what really got him killed: his non-violent fight against poverty (The Poor People’s Campaign).

Such a radical preacher was always considered dangerous to the status quo, but once he fully moved out of the minority interest of Black Americans and started speaking to poor Americans of every color (a vast majority), a line was crossed and his fate was sealed. Still, his vision of a future of fairness and opportunity lingers on in Where Do We Go from Here.

Lorraine Hansberry and her husband Robert Nemiroff were college friends of mine.

Lorraine had a way with words, a sense of justice, and deep compassion. Her Raisin in the Sun made Broadway history. The collage approach to the material in To Be Young, Gifted and Black I’ve found is completely in keeping with the diamond-sharp artistic mind of the woman I knew.

There is something in the structure of this true story that aligns with my fundamental understanding of life as a Black American man.

Education saved me, plain and simple. Education is the answer out of the ghetto, out of street life, out of poverty. Two Black boys named Wes Moore grow up on the same streets, get into the same kind of trouble early, and start a friendship as adults – one is a governor-elect of his home state, the other serving life without parole.

Their names appeared in the newspaper on the same day: for one, the announcement of a Rhodes Scholarship win; for the other, a manhunt in a botched robbery. Little difference between the men, but a lot in terms of where they put their focus.

This is perhaps a cheat, as it’s the script of a film. However, it’s published just like a book, you can read it just like a book, and it was written by my Last of the Lions co-author.

The less said about this thriller the better for the reader, but suffice it to say if Ferguson, or George Floyd, or Breonna Taylor… or Philando Castile…Freddie Gray… Eric Garner… Amadou Diallo… and so many more… mean anything to you, this twisty parable about racial profiling and policing will take your breath away, keep you on edge until the end, and leave you thinking.

This was political scientist Marable's life work, finished right before his death --  and what an accomplishment! Marable dives so deeply into and verifies previously unknown territory. Though supportive of his subject, Marable offers complex and sometimes embarrassing information with no apologies. As a result, he produces the fullest portrait of Malcolm X to date, and the best case about why both the man and his ideas matter.

This might seem like a strange choice since this book is not directly about policing. But it shows in a powerful and direct way how inextricably bound policing is with the basic organization of this society.

Despite the controversies currently surrounding Hayley’s depiction of Malcolm X’s life, the book retains its power to express Malcolm X’s cutting critique of every one of this country’s justifications for its brutal criminal justice system. No one who engages with it can believe that police exist simply to deal with some criminal element in society.

But the book also shows how impossible it would be for this society to somehow “defund” the force used to keep under control the millions of people who, even with all their talents, this society can find no place for.