Description:
From the award-winning author of Beasts of No Nation and Speak No Evil, an insightful and deeply relevant collection of essays about America as it stands now.
Known for his piercing understanding of race in America, Uzodinma Iweala delivers three piercing essays about our civil rights, and how race affects all our lives, most notably today amid rising bigotry and a raging culture war. A Black American of Nigerian descent now living abroad, Iweala is a medical doctor as well as a novelist, and he brings together his gifts for analysis and literary narrative in this thought-provoking and meaningful work.
Reflecting on the last decade, Iweala offers insights into the history of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as other fraught topics, including abortion, health care, sexuality, immigration, and politics. Powerful and informed, mature in outlook and devastating in clarity and truth, United States of Ambivalence captures the doubt, conflict, and uncertainty of being an American today.
Brief description: Uzodinma Iweala received the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for Beasts of No Nation. He was also named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. He was the CEO of the Africa Center and is currently a fellow at the Katë Hamburger Center for Apocalyptic and Post Apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg; a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow and an advisor at UNSECO. A graduate of Harvard University and the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, he lives in Germany with his wife and son.
Review Quotes:
"Uzodinma Iweala is one of our most essential writers. With extraordinary patience, precision and depth, United States of Ambivalence explores some of the critical issues facing the United States today: race, masculinity, faith, free speech and authoritarianism. This is a nuanced and impassioned book, about Iweala's complex relationship with the dynamic, unfinished, endlessly vexing, perpetually contradictory country of his birth." - Katie Kitamura
"The United States of Ambivalence is an incisive account of what it means to be a Black man in an America arguing yet again over who belongs. Iweala writes the book this moment demands, not as an argument to win, but as a reckoning to sit with, holding love and fury in the same breath." - Enrique Acevedo, Emmy award-winning journalist and author of Essential