Kirkus
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A meditation on race and racism in America and its 250th year. Should Black people celebrate the semiquicentennial? Let’s look, as Princeton historian Glaude does, at the bicentennial and a contemporary panel discussion with Joseph H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention; National Urban League leader Vernon Jordan; and historian Lerone Bennett Jr. “Black people had to lay claim to the country and to the cause of freedom that it represents,” argued Jackson, while Jordan counseled participation only to remind white people that Blacks are and have been central to American history. Only Bennett opposed the celebration outright, holding that “the country had failed Black people.” The question endures, and there’s no question but that Glaude agrees with the last view, opening, memorably: “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” The “especially now” part is central, for, by his account, in Donald Trump’s America, whites have “declared that the country belongs to them,” as manifested by the war against DEI, racial considerations in college admissions, and social services. The “America, U.S.A.” of Glaude’s title, echoing John Dos Passos, is a place of fear and hatred, of violence, of racism as policy, ruled by madness and a Praetorian Guard—the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—that “is charged to help make America white again.” But so, Glaude suggests, it has always been, as he invokes images of huge Klan marches in America’s capital and decries John F. Kennedy for rejecting Martin Luther King Jr.’s proposed “Second Emancipation Proclamation outlawing segregation, one hundred years after Lincoln’s.” As Glaude writes, Kennedy did not do so for fear of offending white Southern voters, who in any event revealed their true colors by turning to the Republican Party and, now, to MAGA. So, celebrate? No, writes Glaude. Instead, “we mustall be freedom--seekers, haunting the past for resources to live unshackled from the lies that bind our feet.” A charged renunciation of American unfreedom that could not be timelier. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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Bestseller Glaude (Begin Again) offers a forceful counternarrative to the official commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary by surveying the horrors attendant to some of the nation’s previous anniversaries. Glaude begins by asserting that it is “dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious” as America, particularly as it is founded on an inherent contradiction. America is both a “nation of laws” dedicated to the “equal standing of each individual” but also “a white Republic,” he notes, and it is at moments when the tension between the two “becomes unbearably felt” that “white America risks everything, including the well-being of the country, to resolve it.” (He cites both the Civil War and “Donald Trump’s ascendance” as examples.) But “history isn’t fate,” Glaude argues; it’s rather a “repository” that allows us “to act today with more than luck.” It is in this spirit that Glaude aims to excavate “the usefulness of the past, however ugly.” He begins in 1776 with the story of captured fugitive Moses Gordon, who “chose to drown himself rather than submit again to slavery,” and, from there, visits several other anniversaries, including the centennial celebration in 1876, which was conducted “as violence choked the life out of Reconstruction,” and the 150th celebration in 1926, which arrived during the resurgence of the KKK. The upshot isn’t just a searing revisionist history but a stirring view of America as a place “worth fighting for.” (May)