By Olivia Laing
Norton: 368 pages, $27
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Olivia Laing’s fifth work of nonfiction, “Everybody: A Book About Freedom,” is a compendium of echoes. The approach recalls much of her spirited nonfiction work: “The Trip to Echo Spring,” which traces the link between alcohol and the work of writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Berryman and Raymond Carver; or “The Lonely City,” an examination of urban loneliness through the lens of artists Henry Darger and David Wojnarowicz, among others.
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 03, 2021
The headline read: It was a bloody weekend across Trinidad and Tobago .
The news story announced: From Friday night into yesterday, eight people were killed, pushing the murder toll for the year so far to 113. Victims were found dead in St James, Arima, La Horquetta, Valencia, Curepe, Embacadere, Tunapuna and Petit Valley. (
Express, April 26.) Two more people may have been murdered on that weekend.
All victims were black. There is no evidence that the murderers were black. However, all of these murders took place in black communities which suggests that there might be a lot of pain in those communities. The question remains: what can we do to relieve these communities of this constant trauma of hurt and ineffable loss?
May 03, 2021
The headline read: “It was a bloody weekend across Trinidad and Tobago”.
The news story announced: “From Friday night into yesterday, eight people were killed, pushing the murder toll for the year so far to 113. Victims were found dead in St James, Arima, La Horquetta, Valencia, Curepe, Embacadere, Tunapuna and Petit Valley.” (Express, April 26.) Two more people may have been murdered on that weekend.
All victims were black. There is no evidence that the murderers were black. However, all of these murders took place in black communities which suggests that there might be a lot of pain in those communities. The question remains: what can we do to relieve these communities of this constant trauma of hurt and ineffable loss?
(RNS) More than five decades after he was gunned down at age 39 in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom in an apparent effort to silence him, Malcolm X has retained his voice in American culture. In an era of “Muslim bans” and the killing of George Floyd by a police officer, El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, as he was called at his death in February of 1965, remains an influential figure in pop culture, political activism and among American Muslims.
The Muslim minister and activist’s most recent flare into public consciousness comes with the film “One Night in Miami,” in which Muhammad Ali, R&B singer Sam Cooke, NFL star Jim Brown and Malcolm X (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir) engage in an imagined all-night hang. A biography released last year, “The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X,” presents 30 years of deep research by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Les Payne and his daughter Tamara Payne, who finished the book after her father died in 2018.