06838cam a2200481 4500 246065042 TxAuBib 20151103120000.0 ||||||s2015||||||||||||||||||||||||und|u 9781101870648 1101870648 B00R04MDIQ Amazon 6e68df50-009b-4b45-b798-5045ad9d0743 OverDrive (Reserve ID) 86914 2147978 OverDrive (Product ID) TxAuBib Jefferson, Margo. Negroland [Bridges eBook] : A Memoir. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015. Format: OverDrive Adobe EPUB eBook, Filesize: 6453kB. Format: OverDrive OverDrive Read, Filesize: 6453kB. Format: OverDrive Kindle Book. HTML:A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER At once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac--here is a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, and American culture through the prism of the author's rarefied upbringing and education among a black elite concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both. Born in upper-crust black Chicago--her father was for years head of pediatrics at Provident, at the time the nation's oldest black hospital; her mother was a socialite--Margo Jefferson has spent most of her life among (call them what you will) the colored aristocracy, the colored elite, the blue-vein society. Since the nineteenth century they have stood apart, these inhabitants of Negroland, "a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty." Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments--the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America--Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Aware as it is of heart-wrenching despair and depression, this book is a triumphant paean to the grace of perseverance. (With 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.) From the Hardcover edition.. HTML:"Margo Jefferson's Negroland--autopsy snapshots of mostly upper-class black ways of being and performing--is a tight-lipped performance of willed, earned, and harshly edited silence. Refusing to construct an erotic black body for white consumption, she desires nothing and challenges everything. Asking if it's possible or meaningful to be human, she posits etiquette as the interrogator of America's psyche. She can read a graveyard in a theater, personality in a hairstyle; she lists instead of declaims. Her asperity is elegantly pithy and violent. In the fissures between and among items, she revolts. Her words are ascetic. She doesn't want me to envy her life, the fullness of which is only hinted at. She wants me to leave her alone to live within this sentence of her mother's: "Sometimes I almost forget I'm a Negro." The last two words, Go on, aren't just a writer walking off stage and getting on with life; they convey the pleasure of taunting future pain the truth of vision will surely yield.". David Shields. HTML:"I revere Margo Jefferson's critical voice for its directness and wit and sanity, its tonal precision, its unabashed aestheticism, and its secret pockets of ambivalence. For years she has been a brilliant interpreter of performance; it makes perfect sense that her analysis of race and class--and the painful performances those categories entail--should offer a similarly wondrous intensity of detail, emotion, and wisdom. Negroland, a compactly crafted treasure, showcases a new way to write memoir--a new mode of honest and complicated reckoning, without masks.". Wayne Koestenbaum. "Ever provocative and insightful, the cultural critic Margo Jefferson bravely directs the focus inward to her own life and times as a child of the rigid and nearly invisible world of black elites in pre-Civil Rights, mid-century America. By turns, melancholic and hopeful, raw and disarming, she weighs the psychic toll of constructed divisions at the intersection of race, gender, caste and privilege. A moving memoir that is an act of courage in its vulnerability.". Isabel Wilkerson. "Powerful and complicated . . . power dwells in the restraint of 'Negroland.' Ms. Jefferson gets a lot said about her life, the insults she has weathered, her insecurities, even her suicidal impulses. There's sinew and grace in the way she plays with memory, dodging here and burning there, like a photographer in a darkroom. . . . Ms. Jefferson will not be denied. . . . With luck, there will be a sequel to this book.". HTML:Dwight Garner, The New York Times. "Margo Jefferson's memoir leaps from the mica-sharp evocations of her Chicago girlhood into a strikingly original consideration of American cultural history. If you think you were confident using the words "race" and "class," think again after reading this fierce interrogation of American life. A beautiful scorcher of a book, essential reading.". Patricia Hampl. "Margo Jefferson sees everything and expresses it with surgical clarity. She is the Toqueville of race in America. This is a great book, destined to be read for a century.". Edmund White. "Powerful. . . . Margo Jefferson identifies and deftly explores the tensions that come with being party of America's black elite.". HTML:Roxane Gay, O, The Oprah Magazine. "Jefferson is a national treasure and her memoir should be required reading across the country.". HTML:Nicole Jones, Vanity Fair. "A candid observer, Jefferson articulates the complicated and calculated performance of uppe. HTML:New York Magazine. "Razor sharp, self-lacerating and singular.". HTML:Pam Houston, More Magazine. Biography & Autobiography. Nonfiction. Sociology. History. Media Type: eBook. Importer Version: 2014-01-08.01 Import Date: 2015-11-02 20:00:02. http://bridges.lib.overdrive.com/ContentDetails.htm?ID=6e68df50-009b-4b45-b798-5045ad9d0743 http://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=6e68df50-009b-4b45-b798-5045ad9d0743&.epub-sample.overdrive.com Excerpt (Adobe EPUB eBook) http://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=6e68df50-009b-4b45-b798-5045ad9d0743&.epub-sample.overdrive.com Excerpt (Kindle Book) http://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=6e68df50-009b-4b45-b798-5045ad9d0743&.epub-sample.overdrive.com Excerpt (OverDrive Read)