Up from Slavery, the autobiography by Booker T. Washington, is a book one sees so often quoted in other histories that it’s easy to develop the illusion that you have actually read it.
In most lines of work, for sale a person does his credibility real damage by denying the obvious and asserting the manifestly untrue. Yet in the book world, there can be very large rewards for a writer who boldly turns reality on its head.
“Have you ever been to China?” Before I read Will the Boat Sink the Water?, I thought I could at last answer “yes.” Now I realize I must be more cautious.
I read Bruce Bartlett’s Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past in typescript some months ago. I was tempted to blog about it then, but out of authorial comity decided to wait until the published version was available for everyone to read.