Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul

To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul

Smith, Tracy K.

Paperback

Biographies GeneralGeneral Racism & Ethnic Studies

Publisher Price: $17.00

ISBN10: 0593467981
ISBN13: 9780593467985
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: Oct 29 2024
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
A TIME AND WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice - A stunning personal manifesto on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might--together--come to a new view of our shared past

A vulnerable, honest look at a life lived in a country still struggling with its evils...Hopeful...Beautiful and haunting. --Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of Begin Again

In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the din of human division and strife. With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking--personal, documentary, and spiritual--to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another.

To Free the Captives touches down in Sunflower, Alabama, the red-dirt town where Smith's father's family comes from, and where her grandfather returned after World War I with a hero's record but difficult prospects as a Black man. Smith considers his life and the life of her father through the lens of history. Hoping to connect with their strength and continuance, she assembles a new terminology of American life.

Bearing courageous witness to the terms of Freedom afforded her as a Black woman, a mother, and an educator in the twenty-first century, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment. Weaving in an account of her growing spiritual practice, she argues that the soul is not merely a private site of respite or transcendence, but a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other, and a sounding board for our most pressing collective questions: Where are we going as a nation? Where have we been?

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