What A Detective Novel And A Memoir Both Have To Say About Black American Life

NPR's Book of the Day

NPR

Arts, Books

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2021

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

At first glance, journalist Dawn Turner's book Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood and detective novelist Walter Mosley's Down The River Unto The Sea don't have a ton in common. The former takes place in Chicago and focuses on the tough childhoods of Turner, her sister and her best friend; the latter takes readers to the streets of New York, where a cop-turned-private eye investigates police corruption. But in today's episode, each author talks to Michel Martin about how both their stories illustrate systems that treat Black Americans unfairly, and what that says about justice in the U.S.

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

NPR Privacy Policy

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	It's NPR's Book of the Day podcast.
0:04.5	Journalist Dawn Turner spent years as a columnist at the Chicago Tribune, digging into local issues.
0:10.7	Real nitty, gritty stuff, everything from gun violence to traffic light cameras to, you know, of course, the Cubs.
0:17.1	And a lot of that coverage looked at inequality in different ways.
0:20.8	How and why do some people make it?
0:22.9	And what's stopping others?
0:25.1	Her latest book, The Three Girls from Bronsville, gets personal.
0:28.3	In a bit, we'll hear Turner discuss that with host Michelle Martin.
0:31.8	And then Michelle's going to talk with novelist Walter Mosley about his book,
0:35.6	Down the River Unto the Sea, a pulpy crime story about a
0:39.5	suspected cop killer whose case obviously isn't as clear cut as it seems. But first, here's Turner.
0:48.1	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods.
0:59.6	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
1:07.1	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:12.4	Why does some people make it and others don't? Or rather, they struggle in ways that mystify even the people closest to them. That's the question at the heart of Don Turner's new book, Three Girls from Bronzeville. Turner is an award-winning journalist, a former reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
1:29.7	For years, she wrote about other people's lives in her hometown, but for her new book, she turns her reporter's eye on herself,
1:36.6	her best friend Deborah Trice and her younger sister Kim, as they grow up in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago.
1:42.6	But all too soon, their lives start to take
1:44.5	very different paths, and Turner set out to try to find out why. And Don Turner is with us now to
1:49.8	tell us more. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.
1:54.0	A lot of reviewers have already pointed to sort of the joy in your writing and how you
1:59.2	describe the beauty of the place that you grew up in a way
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.