The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America - Rilegato

American Book Award, 2007 (Come Hell or High Water)  NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Non-Fiction, 2006 (Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?)  Notable Books of 1994, New York Times Book Review  50 Most Inspiring African Americans (Essence magazine)   “Michael Eric Dyson...[is] a world-class scholar, and the most brilliant interpreter of hip hop culture we have...How many folk out there can talk about pimping in terms laid out by Hegel? Or use Kant to explain the way that prison fashion moved from the cellblock to the city block? Dyson drops the names of philosophers and scholar as easily as he does the names of artists on the latest mixtape moving dance floors in the clubs.” —Jay Z   “It’s very hard to both tell the truth and do it with care, but Dyson has proved himself master of this high-wire act. He’s an electrifying man of words – this is clear to anyone who has read him or heard him or seen him speak. Although he is entirely unafraid to walk into a rhetorical firefight, he is careful, he is considered, and he always seeks peaceful resolution to any debate, no matter how fraught.” —Dave Eggers   “Dyson is not only the most talented rhetorical acrobat in the academy—he is also one of the most courageous and engaged intellectuals in America.” —Cornel West   “Michael Eric Dyson embodies the ideal public intellectual for our time: translator, boundary-breaker, and healer of a war torn culture.” —Naomi Wolf    “Michael Eric Dyson combines cutting-edge theoretical acuity with the passionate, engaged, and accessible stance of a public intellectual” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.    “Dyson’s distinctive eloquence...As always, Dyson is fiercely honest, controversial, engaging, funny, and brimming with arguments and ideas.” —Ann Coulter    “Michael Eric Dyson offers a radical reinterpretation of Martin Luther King, Jr.: radical in its politics, radical in its style, and radical in implication.” —George Stephanopoulos   “My man Mike Dyson is not only a serious intellectual, but a hip brother who can identify with everyday people.” —Nas   “Effortlessly and with conviction, he weaves together a range of themes from gangsta rap to graduate seminars, deepening them with highly varied and vividly portrayed personal experience.” —Noam Chomsky   “Such is the genius of Dyson. He flows freely from the profound to the profane, from popular culture to classical literature.” —Washington Post     “In [Dyson’s] prose one hears the fervor of a Sunday sermon; in his ideas one see the analytic scrupulousness of a man who knows a thing or two about tenure committees.” —Time   “[O]ne of the most graceful and lucid intellectuals writing on race and politics today.” —Vanity Fair

Praise for The Black Presidency:

“No one understands the American dilemma of race—and Barack Obama’s confounding and yet wondrous grappling with it—better than Michael Eric Dyson.”
—Douglas Blackmon, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Slavery by Another Name
 
“The Black Presidency is at once scholarly and emotional; historically important and packed with the irony of the moment; mindful of past and present injustices but, like its subject, striving toward hope.”
—Jesse Eisenberg, Academy Award–nominated actor and author of Bream Gives Me Hiccups
 
“Dyson [is] in tip-top form on the essential and enduring dilemma of our republic —and its expression by and upon the first black president.  This is enormously clarifying.”
—Diane McWhorter, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Carry Me Home
 
“Michael Eric Dyson’s account of Barack Obama and the politics of race is riveting, essential reading for citizens trying to understand the promises and pitfalls of America’s racial maze.”
—William Julius Wilson, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University
 
 “A brilliant and searing analysis of what it means to be African American in the Age of Obama.”
— Douglas Brinkley, professor of history, Rice University, and CNN presidential historian
 
 “A provocative and important book on President Obama and his relationship with the black community. Whatever your views, it will help you understand the complex puzzle of race.”
—Walter Isaacson, CEO of the Aspen Institute and author of Steve Jobs
 
 “An urgent and vital contribution to any serious discussion of race in the waning moments and aftermath of Barack Obama’s time in office.”
—Gilbert King, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Devil in the Grove