What Dunbar managed to do involved capturing his unique human experience and expressing it in several different voices. Continue reading The Complete Poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, by Paul Lawrence Dunbar
“Household Workers Unite,” by Premilla Nadasen is an important work of revisionist labor history. It focuses on the African American women who had been invisible to both American labor history and the American labor movement in general. Continue reading Espresso Shots: Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement, by Premilla Nadasen
This week Karl Wolff reviews “The Wars of Heaven: Short Stories,” by Richard Currey, a series of six short stories and a novella focusing on the lives and fates of West Virginians during the Great Depression. Continue reading CCLaP Fridays: The Wars of Heaven: Short Stories by Richard Currey
In Howard Owen’s ninth novel, The Reckoning, the lives of George James and Freeman Hawk meet again after decades of separation. Freeman was an African-American civil rights activist who fled to Canada to avoid getting drafted. George James was a scion of the old money South and an heir to the Old Dominion Ham Company. Owen shifts between past and present, reflecting the tense relationship between George James, widowed and alcoholic, and his son Jake. Freeman Hawk returned to George, but George’s idealization of Freeman makes the opaque circumstances harder to pick up. George tells Jake how Freeman led the … Continue reading The Reckoning by Howard Owen
The Driftless Area Review 