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Carol Anderson is a historian and professor at Emory University whose research and writings have focused on African Americans' struggle for human and civil rights. Anderson earned her Ph.D. from the Ohio State University and has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and more. Her books include White Rage, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and One Person, No Vote, longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Pen/Galbraith Award in Non-fiction. Her latest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, June 1, 2021), illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment.
On your nightstand now:
Students' papers to be graded. Next to them are Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive; Rachel Maddow, Bag Man; Eddie Glaude Jr., Begin Again. Right now, I am being such an adult by taking on all the grading first. But a powerful memoir by someone who can bend language to take you into another dimension, a rip-roaring tale of unbridled corruption at the highest levels of government, and penetrating insights into the writings of a brilliant man who could actually see America, not just look at it, are calling me.
Favorite book when you were a child:
World Book Encyclopedia--the entire set. I really was THAT kid. I had (and still have) an insatiable curiosity, a thirst for knowledge. Reading all the volumes repeatedly is probably where I developed the habit of savoring books (and movies) more than once.
Your top five authors:
Jesmyn Ward, David Oshinsky, Stieg Larsson, Adam Hochschild and Kiese Laymon are poetically elegant writers who tell the tale of regular people, trapped in and fighting against horrific systems of injustice, while holding on to their dignity, sense of self, morality and what is right. I love that!
Book you've faked reading:
It was junior high, I was reading Robert Ludlum for fun, as a result, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations for class wasn't holding my teenage brain's attention. Pip. Miss Havisham. Big, musty, dusty house. Something, something, something.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime is such an insightful and incisive analysis of public policy influenced by wayward social science that it is the exemplar of how to write this type of study engagingly, powerfully and convincingly.
Book you've bought for the cover:
None. I, at least, flip through the first few pages. You really can't judge a book by its cover.
Book you hid from your parents:
Now, if I hid it from my parents, do you think I would tell you? C'mon.
Book that changed your life:
I was going through a turbulent time, a messy break-up, and a good friend sent me Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. That book brought clarity. Clarity brought the calm. The calm brought strength.
Favorite line from a book:
"I can't get to the clothes in my closet
for alla the sorries."
(Please see above.)
Five books you'll never part with:
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns; David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919; David Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery; Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost; John Dower, War Without Mercy. Each painfully reveals the destructive force of racism--domestically and/or globally--and each humanizes those who stood up to fight against that horrific force. These books speak to my soul.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing. This book is so textured, layered, haunting, sad that I want to go back and see what I missed.