Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. On NPR's Books We Love, our collection of 300 plus of our favorite reads this year, you can mess around with a filter tags to narrow down the stuff you or someone you love might want to read. For instance, if you wanted to read a biography slash memoir, that's also a graphic novel, that's also about

family, and that's also an NPR staff pick, well, we've got a few options for you, and we're

going to tell you about two of them today. In a bit, we'll hear from a famous magazine artist

and his story about his family fleeing Cuba. But first, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Darren Bell's memoir. The talk

is about the lesson black kids receive about how black people are seen in the world and the very

real dangers of living in a racist society. And Bell tells Emperor Asia Rosco that it was actually

his white mother who gave him this talk, not his black father. And there's a moment in

this interview where you can really hear him empathize with his father now that he's a dad himself.

That's after the break. In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

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Three years ago, Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist Darren Bell was at work on a biography about his grandfather.

Then came the summer of 2020 and those massive Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality.

Bell had a long talk with his editor about changing the subject of the book entirely and happened to mention something.

I'm having to grapple with whether my six-year-old son is old enough for the talk. I wasn't planning on giving it to him for a couple years.

The talk, as in the talk, black parents give their children about how the world will not be kind to them because of the

color of their skin. I mean, you look at your children and you see innocence and they're precious

and they still believe in magic and they still believe that the world loves them. And you don't

want to take any of that from them. But at some point you have to if you want to prepare them for what's to come. If you don't want to take any of that from them, but at some point you have to, if you want

to prepare them for what's to come, if you don't want someone else to take it from them

in a much worse way.

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