Book Tour Dates, and a Nerve-Wracking Review
I’ve got more book readings scheduled:
*Washington DC: This Tuesday, June 28, 7 pm at Kramers bookstore in Dupont Circle, 1517 Connecticut Avenue NW. (Free, but they ask you to RSVP.)
*Seattle: Saturday, July 9, 6 pm at Blue Moon Tavern, aka “Seattle’s Most Infamous Dive Bar,” 712 NE 45th St. (Free)
Stop by!
In other news, a recent Little Brother review nearly gutted me, from Gerald Early. Officially, Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the African and African American Studies Department at Washington University, but I think of him as St. Louis’ foremost public intellectual.
I value his opinion so highly that I was too nervous to read his review in The Common Reader all the way through the first time, instead just skipping around, my stomach knotting as I encountered passages like this:
What drives the narrative of Little Brother is the compulsion, obsession that Westhoff felt about his relationship with Jorell and the need to make it work, even when Jorell, from all evidence, had lost interest in it or was clearly indifferent to whether their relationship had a future. The book emotionally hinges on Westhoff’s commitment to the relationship which explains why he is so driven to find out who killed Jorell and why. No reader would question Westhoff’s sincerity, his depth of feeling for Jorell. But one might ask if his emotional intensity is partially driven by the racial difference here. Is Westhoff especially motivated because Jorell is Black? Would he have felt the same level of guilt about the relationship’s rupture if Jorell had been White?
Good questions, ones I still need to meditate on. The essay often felt less like a review of my book, and more like a review of my life itself.
But much of the piece isn’t about me or Jorell. The meandering first section concerns Early’s long-ago conversation with a Motown Records etiquette consultant (yes), and the end addresses The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs and ties our books together using a Huckleberry Finn metaphor. There are also a couple factual errors. But overall I found the thing extremely profound, and was thrilled when Early arrived to his final judgment:
What makes Little Brother important and a must-read certainly for St. Louisans is its powerful account of a slice of Black life in our region, a vivid picture of the good and the beautiful and the bad and the ugly of North County, a life cordoned off from the rest of St. Louis as if it were a leper colony. Westhoff’s account of the families, the male bravado, the petty crime, the violence, the art and aesthetic of its rap culture, all of this is worth the price of the book.
All of this to say, please buy Little Brother, and recommend it to others on social media and IRL. Or at the very least, admire the creative misspelling of my last name on this flyer.