How do you explain slavery and reconstruction to readers of all ages? Henry Lewis Gates will

join us to talk about two of his new books, Stony the Road and Dark Sky Rising. What does

our planet's future look like and what can we do about it? David Wallace Wells will be

here to discuss his bestselling book, The Uninhabitable Earth. April is National Poetry Month and we have a

special poetry reading for you. Plus we'll talk about what we and the wider world are reading.

This is the Book Review Podcast from the New York Times. I'm Pamela Paul.

Henry Lewis Gates Jr. joins us now. He is everything, the director of the Hutchins Center for

African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a filmmaker and author or co-author of

more than 20, is it 24 books? It's a bad luck to count. A winner of an Emmy, a Peabody and NAACP

Image Award, a MacArthur Fellow, and many more things. So I am honored and excited to have you

on the podcast. Skip, thanks for joining us. Well, thank you very much. It's a great honor for me.

You have three projects kind of going on simultaneously that are related, actually probably more than

that, but the three I'm thinking of are your PBS series Reconstruction America After the Civil War,

and then two books that we'll talk about today. One for children, Dark Sky Rising, Reconstruction and

the Dawn of Jim Crow, which was written with Tanya Bolden, and then a new book, Stony the Road,

Reconstruction, White supremacy, and the rise of Jim Crow. How do these three projects relate,

and sort of what was the order in which these developed? I had three projects feed up of PBS,

one on the Black Church, one on the Great Migration, and one on Reconstruction. But after the last

general election, it occurred to me and events that ensued. It occurred to me that we were living

in Reconstruction Redemption Reducts, and that the most important contribution I could make

would be to tackle Reconstruction right away, because so many of the issues that are

re-oiling our society today really played out after the 12-year period called Reconstruction,

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