The Books Briefing: Readjusting Our Understanding of History

📚Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone, by Madison Smartt Bell

📚The Eye You See With: Selected Nonfiction, by Robert Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell

📚Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Outerbridge Reach, by Robert Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell

The roots of Route 66

“Route 66 started out in Illinois, a state that itself had nearly 150 sundown towns. The road certainly did not mean freedom for everyone, and it bore witness to some of the nation’s worst acts of racial terrorism.”

📚Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America, by Candacy Taylor

The Supreme Court’s enduring bias

“The Court, [Adam] Cohen suggests, is more influential in shaping national life than many Americans realize. Blockbuster decisions such as Bush v. Gore of course make headlines and attract widespread attention. But Cohen seeks to explore the Court’s place in government in a coherent, structural sense—and the role it plays deeply troubles him.”

📚Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America, by Adam Cohen

Thoughts on Reconstruction

“Slavery, like all other great systems of wrong, founded in the depths of human selfishness, and existing for ages, has not neglected its own conservation. It has steadily exerted an influence upon all around it favorable to its own continuance.”

📚“Reconstruction,” by Frederick Douglass

A forgotten novel reveals a forgotten Harlem

“As a creative work and a historical document, Amiable With Big Teeth is nothing short of a master key into a world where the intersection of race and global revolutionary politics plays out in the lives of characters who are as dynamic and fully realized as the novel itself.”

📚Amiable With Big White Teeth, by Claude McKay​ ​

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Myles Poydras. The book he’s reading right now is Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, by Claudia Rankine.

Comments, questions, typos? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team.

Did you get this newsletter from a friend? Sign yourself up.

Myles Poydras is an editorial fellow at The Atlantic.