“There are enough novels about unreli-
able female narrators and neglectful
mothers to fill a minivan,” said Paula
Woods in the Los Angeles Times. But
in Blythe Connor, a mother who fears
her own daughter almost from birth,
first-time author Ashley Audrain has cre-
ated a character whose struggles are as
relatable as they are unsettling. We are
inside Blythe’s head from the first scene,
when she sits outside her ex- husband’s
house imagining his new family’s happy
home erupting in flames. The rest is her
side of the story of what brought her
there. Occasionally, you may wish to es-
cape Blythe’s mind to hear from anyone
else, said Claire Martin in The New York
Times. But as a playground tragedy be-
comes the crux of Blythe’s tale, Audrain’s
best- seller “conjures the disintegration of
marriage and the pain of parental grief so
movingly that the extent to which Blythe
goes off the rails doesn’t seem that far-
fetched.” We identify with her as much
as we fear her— creating a dynamic that’s
common in psychological thrillers and
“executed with gripping precision here.”ARTS^21
Review of reviews: Books
Charles Blow has become a radical thinker
in the best sense, said Hope Wabuke in
NPR.org. In his new book, the veteran New
York Times columnist argues that the time
has come for black descendants of the Great
Migration to return to the South for the
purpose of consolidating political power.
“In cogent arguments bound together by
his customary incandescent prose,” the
Louisiana native argues that the North has
denied the dreams of the millions who once
fled Jim Crow, subjecting them from the
start to violence and social and economic
segregation that persists to this day. Black
Americans could remain scattered and
powerless, he says, or create “a new Africa
in America,” concentrating their numbers
to produce black majorities that would
dominate politics in as many as seven states,
centered in the Deep South.Don’t expect an airtight argument from TheJournalist John
Colapinto once took
his voice for granted,
said Philip Martin
in the Arkansas
Democrat Gazette.
Back in the 1990s,
when he worked for
Rolling Stone and
sang lead for the mag-
azine’s office band,
“he didn’t consider
the risks of rasping and ripping through
garage-band standards.” But he seriously
injured one of his vocal cords, which later
developed a polyp that has left his speaking
voice with a permanent sandpaper edge.
But the experience left him curious enough
to undertake, as a staff writer at The New
Yorker, a deep dive into the science and
mystery of the human voice. “A tremendous
work of journalism,” his new book could
convince any reader not to ever take their
own pipes for granted again.The book offers “a fascinating blend of sci-
ence, anthropology, sociology, and culture,”
said Deborah Dundas in the Toronto Star.Book of the week
Devil You Know, said Carlos Lozada in The
Washington Post. It’s “more like a rough
thought experiment stretched into book
form,” with all of its optimism built upon
the simple idea that numbers equal power.
Had there been no Great Migration, Blow
argues, black people would probably com-
pose majorities in those seven states, essen-
tially controlling the states’ criminal justice
and education systems plus 14 seats in the
U.S. Senate and 90 Electoral College votes.
By the same theory, there likely would have
been no Republican elected president in the
past half century. Blow deserves credit for
reverse-migrating himself, having recentlyrelocated from New York City to Atlanta.
But he points to Georgia’s going blue in
November as “proof of concept,” credit-
ing the rise of black voter participation and
ignoring the harsh reality on the ground: A
fierce fight had to be waged to overcome
white suppression of black votes.I, too, “found myself wanting more”—
more evidence, more context, said Carole
Bell in TheGrio.com. Still, “one doesn’t
often expect a work of nonfiction to be this
propulsive and exciting.” As Blow points
out, black people have been returning to
the South for a generation already, and
the region is home to most of the nation’s
black-owned businesses and 1,000 of its
1,200 black-majority towns and cities. He
also generates urgency by warning that
because the black population is shrinking
as a share of the total U.S. population, a
consolidation of power is the only way to
prevent black Americans from becoming
the nation’s most neglected minority. To
Blow, waiting for white Americans to tran-
scend racism is foolish when there’s a more
pragmatic option. Whatever its flaws, “The
Devil You Know is convincing”—“both as
polemic and as proposal.”The Devil You Know: A Black
Power Manifesto
by Charles M. Blow (Harper, $27)Novel of the week
The Push
by Ashley Audrain
(Pamela Dorman, $26)This Is the Voice
by John Colapinto
(Simon & Schuster, $28)Drawing on the work of cognitive scientist
Philip Lieberman, he traces the origin of
vocal capabilities to the oldest air-breathing
vertebrate—the lungfish—and details the
series of genetic mutations in humans
that made vocalization and thus spoken
language possible. Remarkably, a child
begins to acquire language and a capacity
to vocalize even before birth, learning from
the muffled speech it hears from the womb.
Elsewhere, Colapinto helps us understand
the physiology that explains why the voice
of Barbra Streisand, say, is close to perfect.We are all quite adept at detecting subtle
variations in others’ voices, of course, said
Elizabeth Erickson DiRenzo in Science
Mag.org. At one point, Colapinto describes
how this skill can mislead us, as when
simple alterations to vowel and conso-
nant pronunciations prompt listeners to
stigmatize speakers from the South as
“backward,” Northerners as “elitist,”
and Californians as “hopeless flakes.”
Colapinto is especially good at describing
the pleasures and emotional power of song,
and so it comes as a surprise in the end
that he chooses to forgo surgery to repair
his own vocal cords. Then again, he seems
to have gained something almost as valu-
able as what he lost: “a genuine apprecia-
tion for his unique voice.”A November voter rally in GeorgiaGe
tty