Black Is the Body
Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine
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Black Is the Body
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Narrated by:
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Emily Bernard
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Written by:
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Emily Bernard
About this listen
“Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably.... Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book.”
In these 12 deeply personal, connected essays, Bernard details the experience of growing up Black in the South with a family name inherited from a White man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a White man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopting two children from Ethiopia, and living and teaching in a primarily White New England college town. Each of these essays sets out to discover a new way of talking about race and of telling the truth as the author has lived it.
"Black Is the Body is one of the most beautiful, elegant memoirs I've ever read. It's about race, it's about womanhood, it's about friendship, it's about a life of the mind, and also a life of the body. But more than anything, it's about love. I can't praise Emily Bernard enough for what she has created in these pages." (Elizabeth Gilbert)
Winner of the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Kirkus Reviews
One of Maureen Corrigan's 10 Unputdownable Reads of the Year
©2019 Emily Bernard (P)2019 Random House AudioWhat the critics say
"Conceived while the author was hospitalized after being stabbed by a white man, these 13 formidable, destined-to-be-studied essays mark the emergence of an extraordinary voice on race in America." (Oprah Magazine)
"Bernard's honesty and vulnerability reveal a strong voice with no sugarcoating, sharing her struggle, ambivalence, hopes, and fears as an individual within a web of relationships, black and white. Highly recommended." (Library Journal, starred review)
"Lucid... deeply felt, unflinchingly honest, and openly questioning ... [Bernard] illuminates a legacy of storytelling... and elaborates on the relationship between blacks and whites. A rare book of healing." (Kirkus, starred review)
"Of the 12 essays here, there's not one that even comes close to being forgettable. Bernard's language is fresh, poetically compact, and often witty.... Bernard proves herself to be a revelatory storyteller of race in America who can hold her own with some of those great writers she teaches." (Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air)