This book was very informative in terms of the historical context surrounding this topic. I liked how he discussed each integral person related to this such as Langston Hughes and gave a detailed overview of their point of view, which made comparisons between multiple point of views easier. I also like the connections to the modern day and the current people the author chose to include in this important discussion.

Avoid this book at all costs! Michael Eric Dyson is an author who deals solely with big words from his thesaurus, but who actually writes very little of value. I found his endless word salads of little used big words to be both boring and uninformative.

Thank you, St. Martin’s Press, for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I just finished What Truth Sounds Like: RFK, James Baldwin And Our Unfinished Conversation About Race In America, by Michael Eric Dyson.

This book will be released on January 14, 2025.

The book is supposed to be about a 1963 meeting that Robert Kennedy had in apartment with James Baldwin, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, activist Jerome Smith with him and several others. The meeting did not go well, as Kennedy was not prepared for the criticism that he and the administration was going to receive.

But, so little of the book was actually about that meeting. The rest of it was the author ranting about other subjects. There were rants on politicians, athletes and musicians, with each of those topics being split on discussing figures from the 1960s and the 2010s.

Occasionally, Dyson made a good point, but I spent most of the book wondering why did I decide to read this.

Those occasional good sets of paragraphs were the only things that resulted in this one getting a D, instead of an F. Goodreads and NetGalley require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a D equates to 1 star. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews

I finished reading this on September 1, 2024.