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A Family Memoir
by Omo Moses
From the son of legendary civil rights organizer Robert P. Moses: a brilliant, unflinching memoir about becoming Black in America that interweaves voices from 3 generations of the Moses family.
In The White Peril, Omo Moses deftly interweaves his own life story with excerpts from both his great-grandfather's sermons and the writings of his father, the civil rights activist Bob Moses. The result is a powerful chorus of voices that spans 3 generations of an African American family, all shining a light on the Black experience, all calling fiercely for racial justice.
Omo was born in 1972 in Tanzania, where his parents had fled to escape targeted harassment by the US government. He did not encounter white supremacy until the family moved back to America when he was 4. Here, he learned what it meant to be Black. He came of age in a Black enclave of Cambridge, Massachusetts, became a passionate basketball player, lived in the shadow of his father's Civil Rights work but did not feel like a part of it until his college basketball career came to an unceremonious end. Unsure what to do next, he took up his father's offer to go with him to Mississippi and teach math to Algebra Project students. Omo didn't know it yet, but it was among those young people that he would find his purpose.
This book is at once a coming-of-age story, a multigenerational family memoir, an epic father-son road trip, a searing account of the Black male experience, and a work that powerfully revives Rev. Moses's demand for liberation.
"[S]earing...Moses nimbly orchestrates the interplay between his and his ancestors' voices, bringing the book to a moving conclusion that looks forward to what his own son might accomplish. The result is a stirring blend of family history and coming-of-age narrative." —Publishers Weekly
"The White Peril is the book I wish I had my whole life; it is astonishing, beautiful, courageous, luminous, heartrending, inspiring, fierce, sympathetic, provocative, necessary, unflinching, and, above all else, true. Braiding together a family history, a civil rights chronicle, and a moving account of his own coming of age under the ever-present threat of whiteness, Omo Moses has written an epic reaffirmation of Black diasporic life and a clarion call for justice. The White Peril is destined to be read and cherished." —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction recipient and author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
"Intricately crafted, and a riveting read, this unputdownable whirlwind journeys through five generations of a Black family fighting for Black liberation, and a young man fighting to traverse the rocky distance between father and son. With sometimes lyrical, sometimes jarring prose, this moving memoir has achieved Omo's stated goal—'to let poetry sit side by side, sit inside the story.' Omo has granted us a glimpse into the psyche of young Black manhood, and a window into the mind of his father, the brilliant visionary, Robert P. Moses." —Lisa Delpit, MacArthur Fellow and author of Other People's Children and Multiplication is for White People
This information about The White Peril was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Omo Moses is an activist, educator, and mediamaker. He is the Founder/CEO of MathTalk, an education technology company that creates products that inspire adults and kids everywhere, particularly those in economically distressed communities, to enjoy math. Omo is a member of the MSNBC Grio 100, a Huffington Post Person of the Day, and a Barr Foundation Fellow.
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