With this collection of more than fifty pieces on politics, photography, travel,
history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today s most
powerful and original voices. On page after page, deploying prose dense with bea
uty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and hist
orical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. S
ebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram. Cole brings us new considerati
ons of James Baldwin in the age of Black Lives Matter; the African American phot
ographer Roy DeCarava, who, forced to shoot with film calibrated exclusively for
white skin tones, found his way to a startling and true depiction of black subj
ects; and (in an essay that inspired both praise and pushbackwhen it first appea
red) the White Savior Industrial Complex, the system by which African nations ar
e sentimentally aided by an America developed on pillage.
