The Grace of Silence: A Memoir

by Michele Norris Narrated by Michele Norris

Overview

In the wake of talk of a “postracial” America upon Barack Obama's ascension as president of the United States, Michele Norris, cohost of National Public Radio's flagship program All Things Considered, set out to write, through original reporting, a book about “the hidden conversation” on race that is unfolding nationwide. She would, she thought, base her book on the frank disclosures of others on the subject, but she was soon disabused of her presumption when forced to confront the fact that “the conversation” in her own family had not been forthright.
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Norris unearthed painful family secrets that compelled her to question her own self-understanding: from her father's shooting by a Birmingham police officer weeks after his discharge from the navy at the conclusion of World War II to her maternal grandmother's peddling pancake mix as an itinerant Aunt Jemima to white farm women in the Midwest. In what became a profoundly personal and bracing journey into her family's past, Norris traveled from her childhood home in Minneapolis to her ancestral roots in the Deep South to explore the reasons for the “things left unsaid” by her father and mother when she was growing up, the better to come to terms with her own identity. Along the way she discovered how her character was forged by both revelation and silence.
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Extraordinary for Norris's candor in examining her own racial legacy and what it means to be an American, The Grace of Silence is also informed by rigorous research in its evocation of time and place, scores of interviews with ordinary folk, and wise observations about evolving attitudes, at once encouraging and disturbing, toward race in America today. For its particularity and universality, it is powerfully moving, a tour de force.

Editorial Reviews

NOVEMBER 2010 - AudioFile

NPR reporter Michele Norris adeptly blends the personal, the journalistic, and the scholarly. She uses family experiences as starting points to investigate topics such as police violence in Birmingham and the image of Aunt Jemima. She brings both the intimate and the dry alive with a versatile voice that gives insight into the characters of the people she has talked with and studied. Her emotion brings alive her father's grace in illness and her mother's reaction to white flight. The book hits hardest in its chapters about Birmingham. There she researches the incident in which her father was shot by police, visits a now-dilapidated black neighborhood, and considers attitudes past and present toward race. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2010 - AudioFile

NPR reporter Michele Norris adeptly blends the personal, the journalistic, and the scholarly. She uses family experiences as starting points to investigate topics such as police violence in Birmingham and the image of Aunt Jemima. She brings both the intimate and the dry alive with a versatile voice that gives insight into the characters of the people she has talked with and studied. Her emotion brings alive her father's grace in illness and her mother's reaction to white flight. The book hits hardest in its chapters about Birmingham. There she researches the incident in which her father was shot by police, visits a now-dilapidated black neighborhood, and considers attitudes past and present toward race. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169149449
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/21/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged

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