Long Way to Go; Black and White in America
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. viii, [2], 451, [3] pages. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index. Signed by the author on the title page. DJ has Autographed Copy sticker on front. Minor edge soiling noted. Jonathan Coleman (born 1951) is an American author of literary nonfiction living in New York City. Jonathan Coleman worked as a book editor with Knopf and Simon & Schuster. In 1980, in a piece about publishing, he was profiled in Time magazine as one of the best editors in the field. In 1986, Coleman began teaching literary nonfiction writing at the University of Virginia through 1993. He lectures at universities throughout the country. Coleman's books have included Exit the Rainmaker (1989), the story of Jay Carsey, a college president who abruptly abandoned his marriage and career and disappeared, a book the Los Angeles Times Book Review called "A fascinating, symbolic statement of the American psyche"; At Mother's Request: A True Story of Money, Murder, and Betrayal, about the Franklin Bradshaw murder (which was hailed as "a masterwork of reporting" by the Washington Post Book World, won an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America and was made into a miniseries); and Long Way to Go: Black and White in America, which Library Journal called "A stunner....Coleman's narrative technique is superb...a brilliant book." In 2011, Coleman coauthored the autobiography of basketball legend Jerry West—West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life—which received critical acclaim and became a New York Times bestseller. The Los Angeles Times named it one of the best nonfiction books of 2011. Derived from a Kirkus review: In the best tradition of journalistic portraits of urban race relations, a writer's earnest search for some sign of hope in an all-too-typically segregated American city. Coleman spent several months in Milwaukee, a city with a particularly stark racial gap, exploring the intransigent and increasingly dramatic division of American society. Framed by the events that feed the media's discourse on race, Coleman's account follows his journey, variously enlightening and frustrating, through the conversations that do and do not take place among people facing their own community in crisis. Coleman's feature-journalism writing style is unremarkable, but it is his reportorial skills that count, and the real voices of his book are those of the women and men struggling with a momentous historical burden as they conduct lives near Milwaukee's racial fault lines: community activists, city politicians, determined single parents, whites attempting to face their own roles in Milwaukee's dividedness. Their accounts of their experiences, ideals, and anger speak very vividly for themselves, and Coleman effortlessly weaves the pasts that brought them to this present-day impasse into a broad historical context. Indeed, Coleman is constantly attentive to the impact of wider issues and other social divisions (especially class). But he invariably returns to the unique way that race penetrates deep into people's perceptions, assumptions, and actions, including his own, even as he gains an understanding of the failures of integration as it has been practiced. Coleman and his readers depart Milwaukee with a richly expanded consciousness of their scope and seriousness, and of the lives at stake in them. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Racism, Civil Rights, Segregation, African-Americans, Milwaukee, Carvis Braxton, Crime, Violence, Howard Fuller, Harambee, Integration, Michael McGee, Jerrel Jones, Welfare, Unemployment
ISBN: 9780871136923
[Book #80766]
Price: $75.00