The Blues as a National Form

Hi, this is Fresh Air. I'm Tonana Moseley. and my guest today is Eddie Glaude Junior He's a professor at Princeton and a familiar voice on the country's hardest conversations about race and democracy He's the author of Begin Again, Lessons from the late James Baldwin, and we are the leaders we've been looking for Those books look clearly at this country's failures but still held onto something hopeful. But his latest book set sentimentality aside It's called America USA, how race shadows the nation's Anniversaries. In it Glaw takes us to the country's big birthdays, eighteen seventy six, nineteen twenty six, nineteen seventy six, and now the two hundred fiftieth and shows us the same ritual each time The nation throws itself a party and quietly edits out the parts of the story it cannot bear to face He goes back to eighteen seventy six, the centennial with Frederick Douglas watching the promise of emancipation come undone And he argues that what happened then is happening again now It's a book written in grief and rage And underneath both, a stubborn kind of love of country We spoke earlier this month in Seattle on stage at the Cascade PBS Ieas Festival day longong gathering of journalists and thinkers hosted by Seattle's public media station Here's our conversation I am so honored to be in conversation with you for so many reasons I've had the pleasure of talking with you many times, our first time though, in person with each other. And I think a great way to start is to actually have you read a passage from the book. Let's start with the very first page. Sure. Before I started reading, I want to just say how honored I am to be in conversation with you to have an opportunity to talk about this book in this moment with you is so meaningful to me U So here it is Bterness at the bottom of the cu I do not love America and never have. especially now It seems to me misplaced or dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious Love is most often felt and experienced close to the ground in the life lived in a particular place in time and in memories that take up residence in the heart I suspect Love of Country is shorthand for the heartfelt relationships and experiences that make us who we are Th thingsings that happen in the place we call home, no matter how complicated that place may be James Baldwin was right Whoever's part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it and some of the people in it And I suppose that is why, in part, we are willing to risk our lives in defense of this place. and of what it might become But in America, those feelings and experiences have always been stained by the ugliness of what white people believe about color that somehow or in some inscrutable way the color of one's skin determines your value You end up spending much of your life trying to prove to others and to yourself Not because you are obsessed with white people, but because you want to live. that you are not A in word Some Americans may believe that this view is a relic of a past that we have long left behind. After all, they might say, We elected a black president and vice president, lookook how far we've come Stop complaining. I hear them say. You teach at Princeton University. You are not a victim But I speak from the experience of a life lived in this country And I trust what I know. What I've seen now sits in the pit of my stomach Whennder that sentence I do not love America. become true to you? When did you consciously realize that that was a truth for you Um, I have written some version of introduction and It didn't land I thought I was holding something back And so, you know writing is mostly about revision And so I return to to that first paragraph and Suddenly this sentence just came on the page And I got up and I started walking around my study. I was afraid of what this would mean if I left it there U And then almost as if, you know something inside of my head just simply said, but this is what you have to say You have to begin here And then you can explain it So I left it there. And I decided, you know, in this time, you have to be courageous and and vulnerable. and daring And I couldn't be truthful. Yeah, exactly One of the things that struck me from the very beginning of this book was that I realized I wasn't reading from the same man who wrote Begin Again. Because in Begin againain, which is a previous book of yours, you use James Baldwin's work to kind of beat back despair. And in this book in particular, I felt that optimism of a truth teller of a freedom fighter, it was gone Yeah. am I right in that feeling in the same way that Langston Hughes we felt in his later writings and in James Baldwin Yeah, so in so many ways, I'm arguing with with Jim. In notes of a native son Baldwin says, you know, I love my country more than anything. And because of that love, I reserve the right to criticize it relentlessly to paraphrase it. I never begin there I didn't begin there Maybe it's because I'm from Mississippi You know, Mhm. But Unrageful. There are moments when I'm battling depression becausecause the country has done this again. A at the end of the beginning again, I said, Well, you know we can we have to make a choice Right? Will we do this or that? And we have a choice to put this moment behind us And look what we did And now People have to raise their children In the midst of this They've guted the Voting Rights Act The redrawing districts. We're in the midst of what could very well be described as a second redemption, a second lost cause And you know, the last sentence of the book speaks that emotion And so what I was trying to do With this book' kind of wr some security underneath my feet. so that I could actually get this rage under control to get them My sadness, my melanchoolia are under control Why anniversaries is a way to look at this country's relationship with race? You could have chosen court cases, you could have chosen lots of different ways. What is it about our nation's anniversaries that allow us to see problem so clearly So at each of these moments, the country has to tell a story about itself. It has to tell a story about its founding. And so here we are in the two hundred fiftieth and look at the kinds of the contours of the story. Just don't look at the UFC arena. or the Great American Fair or the Garden of Statues of Heroes They're going to tell a story. It's going to be a particular story. We're the greatest nation in the history of the world. It's going to be a story about know the saintliness of the founders, a story about the sacredness of this grand experiment. And each of these anniversaries The nation has to tell a story about itself, about its founding. and in each of these moments country is struggling and grappling with its contradiction In each of these moments, the divided soul of the nation is in full view. The bys in nineteen oh three Wote the souls of black fol. And in the souls of Black folk, he says that Black folk see themselves through the eyes of those who despise them. This is what he called double consciousness But I believe that double consciousness is actually a consequence of the double consciousness of the nation that America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom. and as a white repepublic. And to hold those two things together can't really without contradiction. And it deposits a kind of madness the heart of the country And we see it evidenced every single milestone anniversary nineteen seventy six, nineteen twenty six seventy six And by God, two hundred and fifty years later twenty twenty six I want to talk with you in particular about Uh w moments I nineteen twenty six een seventy six I'm very curious about the title America. Pama, USA Wh Why both of those in the title? Yeah, you know, usually it's not a coma, it's a hyphen. Yes. The Italian American the Irish American, you, the blackmer, African American, the hyphen gives us a sense of the kind of the idea of America best represented by Ellis Island, Yes We need to remind the Trump administration about Ellis Islland, right Tama signals a break connection And so American USA actually reflects the divided soul of the country. And so part of what I'm doing is signifying on these attempts to tell the story of America and trying to capture in the title, by way of the comma The divided soul. the double consciousness that haunts this place. And you're talking about the anniversaries and all of the pomp and circumstance. as I'm reading your book laugh at this, but that song bless the USA, proud to be an American because at least I know I'm free. And as I'm reading the words in Your book For the first time, those words at least I know I'm free kept coming back up for me And I wonder what's your relationship to patriotism overall and to that idea of us holding such reverence and such pride in this than this idea of Freedom being something that could be bestowed upon us. Yeah patriotm. You know, the first sentence what it's trying to is hold off idolatry The idolatry of the state, right? something so morally dubious and so abstract, right? And sometimes, and I'll say this and I wonder what you think about this. But sometimes patriotism to my ear sounds like a rebel yell same thoseose people who embrace the flag, who rep themselves up in the piety of the country are often more than not folk who think I should be in my place So cool are behind the assault on voting rights, folk who want to deny the specificity of the experience that shape how I see this place So usually when I hear a robust visceral embrace of love of country You know My head goes on a swive Wh's saying it and for what ends and for what purpose is you saying Um Always served as kind of counter to to the myth to the illusion that this place is a beacon meaning black folks. Yes Yes, John, just think about John Adams. This is an apocryphal story, but John Adams supposedly said to King George, We will not be your negroes At the very moment in which he's giving voice to a notion of freedom It's based on an intimate understanding of unfreedom Us early days of july fourth, if we showed up to the july fourth celebrations, like the July days of eighteen thirty four in New York, we would literally be physically attacked becausecause our bodies represented the contradiction of what was being said We have a counter calendar, what I call a counter alternative commemorative calendar around freedom While the nation is celebrating itself as the embodiment of freedom, we are celebrating january first. Why? Because january first, eighteen oh eight was the day that they ended the transratlantic slave trade We're celebrating in August, West Indian Emancipation Day. Why? Because it's the end of slavery. We celebrate the most important of all of those days in the early nineteenth century is july fifth Douglas' famous july fifth, eighteen fifty two oration stands in a tradition. Why july fifth is the abolition of slavery in the state of New York? Juneenth stands in that tradition where we're giving voice to a notion of freedom over and against a country that embraces the idea of freedom but doesn't quite Live it in practice. I want to spend some real time on two of the anniversaries that sit on top of each other. So eighteen, seventy six in nineteen seventy six So eighteen seventy six is where you note that racial justice starts to get treated as philanthropy Yeah It's a gift that white people can extend and also withdraw rather than something that is owed Can you talk more about that and why this reframe of understanding this is so important as we read through your book and your ideas. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out this cycle Why is it that we're always returning to this? What's going on And one of the ways I've resolved it is that or I haven't resolved the cycle of the way in which I describe it is, okay, if America imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic, and if you can't hold those things without contradiction, how do you finesse it? Well, you fines it by assuming that white people possessed freedom to give and to take away Oh let me be clear now before people get uncomfortable When I say white people, I'm talking at a certain level of generality. This is my reading of James Baldwin. Baldwin will say, I happen to love and I say this, I happen to love a lot of people who happen to be white and then they're white people The point is that we're all we all bear the burden of racialization We're all socialized in this way in which these categories matter to how we see ourselves and understand ourselves, right peopleople believe that they possess freedom to give and to take away. And so what we see is anti slavery movement, right Folk are fighting against slavery, and they are arguing that this contradicts their commitment to principles of equality and liberty and democracy and the like And then once the Civil War amendments are passed, particularly the one that enslavery the thirirteenth Amendment, what do we get? this debate about whether or not these folk can bear the burden and responsibility of citizenship. So you see folk who were once anti slavery suddenly becomees fol who are arguing against extending citizenship to black folk. So fifteen seventy six is this moment. Douglas is Frederick Douglas is grappling with this. He's an example of these freedom stnatues, these people who believe that they can give freedom and to take away. He was born in slavery. you know he escaped. he witnessed Lincoln signed the Emancipation proroclamation, the ratification of the thirteent, fourteenth, and fifteenth Amendments, and he lived long enough to see Jim Crowe. He called these folk the apostles of forgetfulness I And then he would say, and he said in eighteen seventy five, I don't want your arms. I want justice acle of people who want to do something for us as opposed to with us. And so eighteen seventy six is this extraordinary moment, Tanya, when the country engages for the first time after the carnage of the Civil War in a national remembrance of his founding and it engages in this horrific at scale this remembring Fredrick Dougl was actually invited to be on the Dais with President Grant He's trying to get in. This is in Philadelphia, not in Phadphia, Mississippi, but Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Yes He's trying to get in He shows the Philadelphia police officer his ticket which puts him on the Dais. The officer says, there's no way an N wor should be on the Dais with President Grant He would not allow him in. If it wasn't for a senator who sees him, Senator Conchlin, I believe, who sees him and then escorts him in, Fredick Douglas would not have been able to even enter the exposition. Then they sit him on the stage, the most famous orator in the United States at the time. They sit him on the stage and he cannot say a word. He's just there. Silent silent So there's this disreembering that's happening as the country barrels towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the violence of these coups that are taking place, political coups that are taking place in Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia against the backdrop of the horror that will leave over fifty three thousand black people dead by the end of the nineteenth century The country tells itself a story. The grandness of the American project My mama My guest is Princon Professor Eddie Glaw juni. To accompany his new book, Glaude worked with classical composer Joel Thompson to create music to capture what Godl sees as the spirit of the nation Here's pianist Leah Clayborne, performing the piece called Anne Blue Was Lia Clayborne performing and Blue M more of our conversation with schcholar Eddie Gaud Junr. after a break I'm Tona Moseley and this is fresh air Thinking about twenty twenty when We all seem to be coming to this same realization in the same way that we found during Reonstruction, where, oh, we understand the ills. We want to right the wrongs And the white Allies are in our corner and they believe us and they're speaking truth to power as well And then something happens and like The idea of it being a philanthropic effort, this idea that you can put it on the shelf and then you can take it off the shelf when it comes to racial quality Yeah Yeah Sentimentality att the heart of this idea that certain people think that they possess freedom to give and to take away is the cycle of sentimentality and rage You cry your crocodile tears I remember writing this passage trying to figure out just five years ago, six years ago We were in the midst of a racial reckoning. I was crying on national television George Floyd and the like in the blink of an eye We're here. In the blink of an eye And the only thing I could conclude is that people were lying You aren't telling the truth Or You didn't have anywhere else to land and you just return back return to the status quo And so I was trying to describe it in a way Drawing on Baldwin's notion of sentimentality and Oscar Wilde and others, right? That sentimentality is really just you know about your own individual feelings. Mat Baldman says it's the mask of cruelty Right? You cry your crocodile tears source, Oh, we want to do this for you. We're going to make sure're're we're going to resolve our We're going to absolve ourselves of our sins by actually engaging in this effort. We're going to tell the truth about what we've done. And then when the people who bear the brunt of what we've done continue to ask for justice, then the question becomes, what else do you want We've given you enough Overreach How much more are you gonna ask? And as soon as you hear those questions we're on the cusp of the backlash the rage And here we are Because sentimentality carries with it Rge, Uncle Tom You know who's the flip side of Uncle Tom Turner Yes Yes. same side of the same coin in our imaginations. Yes. This I'm thinking we're being a too hard, y'all all right You sure This is Seattle, okay. It's not we can go there. We can go there with Sattle I. che one. Yeah. I want to go back to Frederick Douglas though, eighteen seventy six. It's the centennial, As you said, it's the nation's hundredth birthday. turned away initially and He is the most famous black man in America at the time. he's watching it all collapse around him Take me in particular though, to july fifth. Yeah eighteen seventy five, what was he contending with as he's preparing to speak? Yeah you know usually we talk about july fifth, eighteen fifty two He delivers that famous july fifth address in Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York But in eighteen seventy five The old man has to figure out what he's going to say to the country. What he's going to say to these people in metropolitan Church And he knew exactly what was going to happen come eighteen seventy six. They would tell the story of the grandness of the American project And it so mirrors our day. Here's that moment. Douglas says, and I always get choked up when I say, We gained our freedom through the falling out white men Now we must brace ourselves, I'm paraphrasing. For what will happen Now that they've reconciled. We must brace ourselves for what's to come. Yes And It's a powerful speech So so much so that I try to pull it forward By the time I get to twenty twenty five and I'm trying to write to the twenty twenty six Celebration, ye. Yes I was surprised to know that you went to school in Philadelphia, but you had never really taken tours of all of the landmarks, but you decideed to take a tour of Independence Hall, what was it like twenty twenty four, so not that long ago. and you're on this Pour And you're hearing this tour guy tell a story. And what's interesting about that time period is There was a lot of effort that went into making it diverse to kind of show a more perfect union And you're noticing something very specific as you're going through this tour. What did you find? Well, it's a storybook version of America, right R. And tal he's taking us through the Congress hall, right And I've never, I've never been a tourist. I could go I go overseas and I stay at my hotel and read books. My wife hates So I'm in Philly. I never go to to the Liberty Bll or any of that stuff But here I wanted to return to it. and he's telling the story And he looks like o He's cosplaying a kind of drill sergeant. He has his, you know forstry outfit on and. And he's walking us through the the House and then the Senate And he's telling us these stories and finally talks about the conflict between that they weren't divided according to U u, party, but a you know region and whatnot. and said the biggest conflict is that they came from the south and the north. And I was like, o Here we go We're going gonna start talking about slavery now. Yes Got it And he says, they didn't know how to shake hands That was the example of the conft That was the conflict between the Congress persersons that they didn't one would bow n. And I was like, that's it We're not going to And so and then I just saw ghosts I saw ghosts all around. Congress Hll. You know Pured lip ghosts, Right. But it was an example for me, a startling example of the storybook version of the country Because in that very building Congress decideed by Only one person voted decided to maintain the fugitive slave law. Yes And Moses Gordon's story is located right in that moment. Talk a little bit about Moses Cton Moses Gordon was You see how good she is Moses Gordon was enslaved and manumitted in seventeen seventy six just three months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in North Carolin His slave master was Caleb Trueblood, a Qaker And for two years M Moses Gne lived as a free man, but the colony or the You know,outh North Carolina had passed a statute saying that you could not manument your slaves unless for a meritorious service unless they fought in the revolutionary War Moses Gordon was captured two years later. and sold back into slvery Any freedom dream And then he escaped and he escaped to Philadelphia And for ten years he lived as a free man But because of the fugitive slave clause in the Constitution and the Fugitive sllave Act of seventeen ninety three Moses Gordon was a thief. Be he stole himself He belonged to The man to whom he was sold, Brigadier General William Skinner. And ten years later, he was captured Put in shackles and was to be sent back to North Carolina In the papers of John Parrish, a Quaker abolitionist at Haverford College reside are the manission papers of Moses' Gord And on the back John Parrish wrote, Instead of returning to slavery, Moses Gordon committed suicide. And that becomes a story of freedom snatch you He was freed enslaved captured Dath and it becomes through Line. We're listening to the conversation I had on stage with Eddie Glaude Juni. at the Cascade PBS Ias Festival Claude's new book is America USA. more of a conversation after a break This is fresh air I want to take us now to nineteen seventy six because this is a time period where you and I are alive, We're coming of age U How old were you in nineteen seventy six? Eight. You were eight years old. Yeah It's the bicentennial And u The question has shifted by then. This is the apex of white flight. The thick of desegregation fights and It's the first time as you write in your book that the nation is forced to kind of acknowledge black history The question isn't whether black freedom should be retracted, it's whether we should participate at all in the bicentennial. Can you talk briefly about that? Sure You know, it's just I remember as well I have a photo, I have a vague memory of me being in red, white and blue pants ye kity seventy six bicentennial celebration was, you know, from red, white and blue whoopie cushions to a range of things. But this is a celebration really of white ethnics in nineteen seventy six. Remember nineteen twenty six, there is this real intense debate around immigration And this is such an interesting point in history because this is where immigrants have the ability to become white. They have a choice to make. And as black people, we sit very squarely in that because we're representative of what the journey of the country itself. Yes But you know, nineteen twenty six, you know, if you're from Italy, you're from Ireland, you're Jewish, you're from the S wholeo countries of Europe. The clan can't stand. are they are as much against Irish Catholics Catholicism in particular as they are against black people in the nineteen twenties But by nineteen seventy six Their children are claiming the revolution as their own Black folk are still arguing we're in this moment of deep dissensus, Tanya Watergate Vietnam, Black power, the Back stud SDS, there's all of this deep suspicion and skepticism about the country. And so the bicentennial is supposed to be this ritual that's going to bring us together over and against all of this conflict and discord that's defined the decade of the sixties and the early part of the seventies And is this the first year? because in nineteen twenty six is the first. First time Negro History Week is celebrated. In nineteen twenty six, nineteen seventy six, Negro History Week becomes Black History Month. President Ford recognizes and acknowledges Negro History Week and then Black History Month There's this debate Because bllack folks are still struggling. A't we to celebrate this? Because what's happening is that instead of disappearing black history, Black history is being absorbed into the story of America to affirm America's inherent goodness So you write about the Reagan years. Yeah This is the time period where we start. talking about like color blindness. It's a sorting. It parts black history fit into this fairy tale, but we're still kind of off to the side. It's not integrated into the full story What so makes this moment so crazy? is that they don't even accept the redacted version of our story So Reagan signs himL K holiday into law. Barack Obama becomes the kind of culmination of that, right? Even so much so he can tell the story of the march on Washington in such a way that you know affirms the possibility of American life. We lost our way with black power, but no, no, no, no, this is what we're doing The Mgafolk don't even want that to be a part of the story But what we see in this moment is this absorption of black history as an affirmation of the inherent goodness of the country. So our story is blunted It doesn't provide a critique Right? Instead Right? and The country can tell our story and pat itself on the back Look at you. Look at me. Exceptionalism. Look how far we've come. Y. Look how decent we are And then in the blink of an eye We find ourselves here. You call this book an elegy It's pitched in the note of the blues But I want to know very quickly why the Bues is the right form of the story of America at this two hundred fiftieth anniversary. And I'm going to double this question as well to ask you what you will be doing on july fourth or july fifth. Um, why are the blues? and what am I gonna be doing? America has to grow up It can't, it can no longer Tide in its adolescence You know, when grown folk act like kids They're monstrous More often than not And so keeps telling itself this story that affirms its innocence and what the blues does. The Bues, right takes you to the heart of the problem Be be Kings, noobbody loves you but my mother and she can be jiving too It offers a tragic sense of the world. We don't have to be all angels The devil and the angel is in us So all we need to do is to look in the mirror. So we need to grow up becausecause if you don't grow up, you can bomb Iran and then tell somebody else to fix it If you don't grow up, you can do all of this evil in these detention centers, in these black sites and not hold anybody responsible, right? be You can become complicit with evil because you are by definition innocent The country has to sing the blues And you know what We've deposited it there since we got here thing you talk about too is like We aren't just a part of history, American history. We are interwoven into the very meaning of what this country is. It's on our tongue. It's in our food We have your country no, no. We in the fullness of our diversity make this place swing. So on july fourth and july fifth We need to show the full diversity of America and claim the country as our own Eddie Glaude, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for this conversation. When you say I do not love this country, actually this book is a love letter to America You got me Yes, Thank you, abbsolutely. Slaude juni. author of America USA How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. After a short break, book criting Marurene Corgan reviews some spring releases on her summer reading list This is fresh air Critic Marureenne Corggan, Summer Reading sometimes means catching up on the books she missed earlier in the year. Here's her short roundup of some spring books I love reviewing books But sometimes the pace of reading them can feel like that classic I love Lucy episode at the chocolate factactory The conveyor belt speeds up and the books keep coming along faster than they can be wrapped in a review Summer gives me a chance to catch up with some good books that whizzed by in spring James Lazden, the familyam man, came out the first week of May, which is when I read it This nonfiction book, which grew out of a piece Lasdon wrote for the New Yorker is about the investigation and conviction of prominent South Carolina lawyer, Alec Murdoch twenty twenty one murders of his wife and adult son. Then came the real life plot twist. a little over a week after Lazden's book was published, Murdoch's conviction was overturned because of jury tampering A retrial is being scheduled Rather than rendering the familyily man obsolete, This new twist intensifies the miasma of stories that swirl around the Murdoch case including suspicious deaths and embezzlement Lasdin is a true crime writer in the reflective mold of his late New Yorker colleague, Janet Malcolm Although investigating the double murder case drives this narrative Lasden is most interested in exploring the ultimate unsolvable mystery. The Mystery of evil Harriet Clark's debut novel The Hill, which came out in May has been getting tons of deserved praise The novel draws explicitly from Clarark's own background. Born in nineteen eighty B was eleven months old when her mother, a member of the Radical Weather Underground, was arrested and sentenced for her involvement in a Brinks armored truck robbery that resulted in the deaths of three men Clark's maternal grandparents got custody. And she visited her mother in prison for almost forty years before she was parooled in twenty nineteen Clark's main character, Susanna, is eight when the story begins and living with her grandparents, former members of the American Communist Party The plot here is a marvel of sustained claustrophobic stasis Every week Susanna is taken first by her grandfather, then by a nun then on her own to visit her mother in the children's center in Hillcrest Prison Susanna's voice charges this novel with intelligence Listen Each week, my mother fixed and reixed my hair I slept and didn't sleep Around us, women counted down to release But my mother and I had been released from countdowns. No reason to look forward interest in looking back We were, as I saw it, Free of the past and free of the future. Carnival Day, friendriendship Day, birthday dayay, the holidays followed their own llting rhythms And eventually, we submitted again to the lull and pleasures of our timeless life All the while I was reading the hill I kept thinking of YL Dctors The Book of Daniel, inspired by the Rosenberg case. Two novels differ in scope But like doctoro Clark interrogates the cost of parents' radical commitment. on their children as well as how the world itself shifts radically from generation to generation Sometimes I put aside a good book for a bad reason Mary Costello's slim novel A beautiful Loan Houted as a devastating story about relationships came out in March No, I thought back then Not another Urzat Sally Rooney in time for Saint Patrick's dayay But one empty afternoon, I picked it up. reading. Mostly because the present tense narration of the main character, Anna struck me as so weird in tone Her deadened voice was at odds with her emotional turbulence Here's nineteen year old Anna, summarizing how Paul An elusive older man shall eventually marry keeps her enthrall to what she calls this oscillating life In the middle of the night, he rises on one elbow in the bed beside me And in an urgent, desperate voice says, I love you in the morning He makes no reference to this. And I think he must have spoken in his sleep Never again in our lives together will he say those three words? The beautiful Lone spans twenty five years and Anna's obsessive devotion to two men, one dog The writings of Camu and Young and the practice of Islam Like the other two books I've caught up with here, it may not be the ideal beach read Perfect for a wash out of a summer weekend Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University She reviewed The Family Man by James Laston. The Hill by Harriet Clark and a beautiful Loan by Mary Costello. Tomorrow in fresh air, as we approach America's two hundred fiftieth birthday, writer Jesse Wegman tells the forgotten story of James Wilson brilliant eighteenth century lawyer who played a critical role in crafting the Constitution pushing for a strong federal government and the direct election of lawmakers book is the Lost Founder I hope you can join us with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews Follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Ourhare'secudy producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krinzel, Theeresa Madden, Moniqu Nazareth, Thea Challiner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nessfer