Author: Scott Malcomson File Type: epub A bold and original retelling of the story of race in AmericaWhy has a nation founded upon precepts of freedom and universal humanity continually produced, through its preoccupation with race, a divided and constrained populace? This question is the starting point for Scott Malcomsons riveting and deeply researched account, which amplifies history with memoir and reportage. From the beginning, Malcomson shows, a nation obsessed with invention began to create a new idea of race, investing it with unprecedented moral and social meaning. A succession of visionaries and opportunists, self-promoters and would-be reformers carried on the process, helping to define black, white, and Indian in opposition to one another, and in service to the aspirations and anxieties of each era. But the people who had to live within those definitions found them constraining. They sought to escape the limits of race imposed by escaping from other races or by controlling, confining, eliminating, or absorbing them, in a sad, absurd parade of events. Such efforts have never truly succeeded, yet their legacy haunts us, as we unhappily re-enact the drama of separatism in our schools, workplaces, and communities. By not only recounting the shared American tragicomedy of race but helping us to own, even to embrace it, this important book offers us a way at last to move beyond it.**Amazon.com ReviewIn this exhaustive, introspective study of Americas obsession with color, nobody escapes author Scott L. Malcomsons probing. The obvious white supremacists share scrutiny with the Indians, Hispanics, and African Americans who have turned inward in their reaction to racism and called for their own noninclusive territory. The books imposing size and scope--it roves from early assimilation attempts by Indians to the Harlem Renaissance to white flight through the ages--may put off some who mistake it for a stale textbook. That would be a shame. Malcomson writes with a lyrical, storytelling quality. He mixes solid reporting with his own thoughtful speculation in tracing the histories of Indians, whites, and blacks in this country. Woven through this vivid narrative are the authors conversations with descendants of his own ancestors, who commingled in marriage and love with Cherokees and former slaves. Raised by a seemingly colorblind Baptist preacher father, Malcomson writes of his dismay as a boy as he and his friends began to think with our skins and separate by race as they grew older. These were roles prepared by the American generations that had gone before the past was forming us, and so we would carry that past into the future. I have never ceased regretting that process, because it diminished each of us. Its clear how Malcomson feels about what he calls Americas tragic drama, but he avoids preaching and gains credibility in doing so. His account is worthy reading for anybody who believes the dramas ending has yet to be written. --Jodi Mailander FarrellFrom Publishers Weekly In a breathtaking and unusual treatment of the artifice and hypocrisy that has surrounded racial differences in America from its earliest settlement to the present, this massive work offers stunning insights with a subtle hand. The first three parts of the book deal with indianness, blackness and whiteness respectively, followed by a fourth, which aims to reconcile the previous sections. The opening exploration of the opportunistic ways that philosophers, politicians and white society have defined Indian identity and land rights is haunting and powerfulDas is the chapter on the Indian as slaveholder, which reveals the life of black slaves on a Cherokee reservation and their march on the Trail of Tears beside their masters. But the rest of the book does not deliver upon the promise of the first 100 pages. Although the focuses on America, Malcomson journeys back into the medieval and the ancient world to find the defining moment when skin color was associated with good, evil and slavery. At times, this wide-ranging approach yields surprising insights (for example, Malcomson offers a thoughtful discussion of Shakespeares outlook on blackness). However, he also includes long-winded digressions that are not securely anchored in his larger argument. Malcomson (Empires Edge Travels in South-Eastern Europe, Turkey and Central Asia) reveals the creation of race as a tool to obtain power, suppress the newly created powerless and justify immoral claims to land and property. Although not fully realized, his ambitious study of race and American identity is to be commended for dragging our racial conundrums further into the light of day. (Oct.) 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author: Marie Carre File Type: epub Absorbing and compelling reading from beginning to end, AA -1025 Memoirs of the Communist Infiltration Into the Church is a must read for every Catholic today and for all who would understand just what has happened to the Catholic Church since the 1960s.In the 1960s, a French nurse, Marie Carre, attended an auto-crash victim who was brought into her hospital in a city she purposely does not name. The man lingered there near death for a few hours and then died. He had no identification on him, but he had a briefcase in which there was a set of quasi-autobiographical notes. She kept these notes and read them, and because of their extraordinary content, decided to publish them.The result is this little book, AA-1025 Memoirs of the Communist Infiltration Into the Church, a strange and fascinating account of a Communist who purposely entered the Catholic priesthood along with many others, with the intent to subvert and destroy the Church from within. His strange yet fascinating and illuminating set of biographical notes, tells of his commission to enter the priesthood, his experiences in the seminary, and the means and methods he used and promoted to help effect from within the auto-dissolution of the Catholic Church.No one will read this book without a profound assent that something just like what is describer here must surely have happened on a wide scale in order to have disrupted the life of the Catholic Church so dramatically.