In this fascinating book that reads like a longread essay, author Michelle D. Commander uses the notion of mobility and technologies of transportation to answer this question: "What is the value of Black life in America?"
Educators: This is an excellent example that I'll be using as a classroom model of how to read across a theme.

I love the premise of this, exploring the history of race in the US via modes of transportation.

However, I feel like this didn't exactly meet my expectations. For one I felt like Commander couldn't decide whether to focus on their personal history, local history, or national history. The result is mostly history with the odd smattering of personal and national mixed in. I found everything kept coming back to CISCO and what its rise and fall meant in the mid-twentieth century.

Also I don't mind in text citations, but there were A LOT in here, and it honestly broke the narrative, Commander's 'voice' doesn't get to shine through. And I'm not even certain what the intention of these quotes were, I would have liked to hear their take on them, what they meant at the time, and what they mean today.

There were some bizarre formatting issues that were disruptive to someone easily distracted like me. The photos didn't always sit where they made sense, they would often appear before or after the relevant passages. There were also odd letters capitalized throughout that don't appear to have been intentional in nature. Little things...

I feel like a fifth mode of transportation could have been included to get the narrative into the more contemporary era. Instead we end with bus and desegregation, wouldn't it have been better to end in the late twentieth century, or even the twenty-first. Considerable changes have occurred, even if turning on the news today in North America sounds quite similar to the era Commander leaves us with.