Amazon.com (ISBN 037575881X, Paperback)

The civil rights movement not only changed America for the better, it also inspired some of the nation's best writing, as the pieces collected in Voices in Our Blood illustrate. The 40 essays contained in this anthology succeed in "capturing the complications behind the public spectacles and charting the competing impulses of grace and rage--the proper province of reporting, reflection, and writing," writes editor Jon Meacham in the introduction. Many famous novelists, journalists, and poets appear in these pages--Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, William Faulkner, Rebecca West, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty, E.B. White, Tom Wolfe--as well as many obscure writers who managed to capture moments in time for the benefit of all. All of these pieces deal with the multifaceted dimensions of America's dark history of racism and discrimination, its consequences, and, hopefully, its cure. This first major collection of enduring writing on the civil rights movement is a powerful and moving portrait that deserves to be read by all Americans. --Eugene Holley Jr.