Anthony Walton - Böcker

American Blacks are entering a new phase in the struggle against white supremacy. Standing firmly in the African American tradition, Walton believes in the possibility of reconciliation with those whites who desire it, offering a hand of friendship and pragmatic ideas for paths forward. Born into the Civil Rights Movement, author Anthony Walton observed firsthand the opening of opportunity for racial reconciliation. He also saw systemic racism and the vicious backlash against Black progress embodied in the Southern Strategy, Tea Party, and MAGA. Over time, Walton came to believe that moving forward requires a “Third Reconstruction” to accomplish what remains: better health outcomes, secure voting rights, and sustained economic and educational opportunity. Only this approach, he believes, will accomplish what remains unfinished for true African American equality. Blending social history, bracing analysis, and autobiography, this dazzling collection includes essays published in The New York Times and The Atlantic—including “Willie Horton and Me” and the much-anthologized “Technology vs. African Americans”—as well as new work that probes Walton’s earlier thinking. Throughout, the author delivers insights that wrestle with the hydra-headed, ever-changing realities of an American society in which the more things change, the more they stay the same. The End of Respectability illuminates recent American history as experienced by a writer who has remained open to hope, unfazed by failures, and unflinchingly dedicated to the truth. This book will leave you changed. And just may incite you to be a part of the change we need.

A journey through heaven and earth for the questing mind. Navigating from the clockwork music of the spheres to the “melismatic celebration of disaster” that is the blues, these are poems that map the places where orderly cosmic harmony and dissonance converge.“If only the world were as orderly as Bach, if there were no need for gospel, no need for jazz, no need for the blues.” As Anthony Walton writes, centuries ago, Johannes Kepler observed that the universe was a form of music. Walton now expands Kepler’s vision to include the music of our lives.He explores how artists such as Thelonious Monk—born into an America South of “disorder and chaos” made new rules based on African American forms and sounds. As Walton writes of Monk and bebop jazz: It made me understand that there was more to music thanresolution, that there were other sorts of beauty. That beauty could be pain, and balm could be fit to the jagged shadowsof my experience.This collection offers indelible studies of musical icons: the “whiskey voice” of Etta James, Glenn Gould as “a cosmologist,” Louis Armstrong, “masked in a smile so bright it had to be a grimace,” Miles Davis, “one blue note at a time.” Throughout, Walton finds cosmic truths in the grit of everyday life—from the third shift on a loading dock to the “dank nubbed platform” of a New York City subway. And there are equally startling moments of clarity when personal, intimate truths are found in physics and the cosmos. Whether his subject is Sir Isaac Newton or street traffic, Walton is always surprising, with humanity and passion in every line. Celestial Mechanics is more than a book of poetry; it is an “Ars Poetica” for the heart.