Black Deaths Matter

9780316312479_e13eeGrabbing media attention, They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample), is a debut book by Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery, part of a team who won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for WP‘s coverage of police shootings.

The NYT review says it is “electric,” in part “because it is so well reported, so plainly told and so evidently the work of a man who has not grown a callus on his heart.”

It is a book, says the paper, with “a warm, human tone” that details the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray; explores racial conditions, in the wake of all the police shootings and the Barack Obama’s presidency; and introduces “a new generation of black activists” and the black reporters who cover them and the events they are protesting.

Lowery was on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday talking, in part, about the implications of the election:

“One thing that was remarkable about the election of President Obama was that he did so with a rhetoric and with an ideal that we were not a divided America. It’s fundamental to his ideology of American exceptionalism. What’s been remarkable is that Donald Trump ran on an ideology and a platform that we are in fact a divided America, that there is an us vs. them, that we need to take something back from people who have seized it from us.”

Expect more attention. It is on multiple most anticipated lists including New York Magazine‘s and is getting coverage in newspapers from coast to coast, including the Boston Globe (subscription may be required), Chicago Tribune, which calls it a “behind-the-scenes narrative” of the “black death beat,” and the Seattle Times. Even other countries are taking notice, such as Macleans in Canada and the BBC in the UK.

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