Ah yeah!! The Sunday Spotlight is shining bright! And Farah Jasmine Griffin step up and claim your 👑 crown. Thoughts 👉🏿 Upon further consideration(drum roll) I’m going 5 bright stars⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. Indeed this book is as profound as the subtitle states. It moves between memoir, autobiography, literary criticism, and the intersection of great literature which needs to be mined for themes such as Rage and Resistance, Death, The Quest for Justice, and others. Always relating the texts to her personal life and more broadly to the African American community and beyond. Her scholarship is deployed in a very accessible way, taking the reader out side the classroom. Here she discusses Death and the reason why Black folk “seem open to the possibility of visitations from the dead” What one might term ghosts. “The omnipresence of death in our lives might be the reason we were so open to the possibility of visitations from the dead. Might it have been yet another mechanism to help us have some sense of control over the otherwise senseless occurrence of frequent death?”….. Everyone dies. But Black death in America is too often premature, violent, spectacular. The particular nature of Black death haunts Black writing, as it haunts the nation. It haunts this book, born as it is from my own mourning of my father’s premature death.” The literature she references will make you run to the library or bookstore. She leans on the works of Toni Morrison highly in this book, and dedicates the book to her, Ms.Morrison was a “deep influence” on her and she states SULA(the novel)”changed her life.” The way she breaks down literature is definitive scholarship on display. I’ve read a lot of Morrison, but I feel like now I have to do some rereading. That’s the kind of takeaways you will experience with this book. And her chapter on music, gave me all the feels! Stand up and take a bow, Ms. Jasmine Griffin!You’ve made us all so proud! This book will turn a casual reader into a lover of literature! #readuntilyouunderstand #ownvoicesreviews #bookpusher #pushingbooksainteasy #goodblackreads #bookreview #bookrecommendations #blackbooksmatter #bibliophile #wwnortonpublisher #readmorebooks (at Houston, Texas) https://www.instagram.com/p/CV-wVAmrsEX/?utm_medium=tumblr