This is the second volume in the "First of the Year" Series.
Contributors like Armond White, Philip Levine, Donna Gaines,
Lawrence Goodwyn, Irving Louis Horowitz, Charles O'Brien, Fredric
Smoler, Paul Berman, and Amiri Baraka are back (and blazing). And
there are important new voices in the "First" mix, such as Vincent
Harding, Roxane Johnson, and Bob Levin. If there is a leitmotif to
this edition, it is the election and inauguration of Barack Obama
as the first African-American president. "First" aims to be up to
the minute of this moment.
As Benj DeMott notes "a glance at this volume confirms the
margin is still the center for us." And that margin stretches from
Harlem to the world. There are tales of edgy sojourns in
Afghanistan, Thailand, and South Africa. The volume also has a
Question & Answer with Ousmane Sembi1/2ne, who taught Africans
to resist "elements of received culture-those fixed rules and
values which nobody but those on the margins dare to question." A
second interview with Adam Hochschild celebrates the Englishman who
invented abolition, and an African-American original who coined the
phrase "crimes against humanity."
The volume includes a protest against the Israeli war machine
by Uri Avnery who has long been a creative outsider in his own
society. It makes the case that American ideologues (on both
extremes) keep getting the Middle East wrong because they cannot
grasp the complexities of any country, including their own. "First
of the Year's" minority angles of vision will help readers see with
new eyes. It will help their hearing too. The volume has plenty of
music writing marked by loving attention to details of pop
performances. In short, this collection reflects its editor;
direct, unafraid, urban, and entirely contemporary.
General
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