Description: W. E. B. Du Bois never felt so at home as when he was a student in Berlin. Germany was the first place white people had treated him as an equal. But anti-Semitism was prevalent, and Du Bois' challenge, says Kwame Anthony Appiah, was to take the best of German intellectual life without its parochialism--to steal the fire without getting burned.
Brief description: Kwame Anthony Appiah writes the Ethicist column for The New York Times Magazine. A professor of philosophy and law at New York University, he is the best-selling, award-winning author of The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity; Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers; The Ethics of Identity; and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.
Review Quotes: In Lines of Descent, Appiah has penned one of the most exquisite accounts of W. E. B. Du Bois's intellectual heritage. The most towering figure of modern black thought and protest literature is recast here as 'a cosmopolitan through and through, ' drawing deeply from the wells of learning in the early twentieth century German academy. This is not just another book about the genius of Du Bois, his wide learning or global predilections. Lines of Descent reveals that some of America's most enduring notions of race and racial identity--from the 'problem of the color line' to 'two warring ideals in one dark body'--are based on Du Bois's earliest synthesis of European romantic notions of race, culture, and nation. Appiah reminds us that over the course of his long life, Du Bois strove to reconcile blackness as one among many, a thread in a tapestry of global humanity.--Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America