Colson Whitehead Archives

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The Weekly Wrap: July 12-18

Smoke Days

As a reader, one of my delights has always been in snow days, when blizzards and cold make staying inside and reading. In our brave new climate world, snow days are increasingly infrequent. But this week delivered the new climatological replacement: the Smoke Day. In our part of the United States, if Canada is having a wildfire season and the winds are out of the northwest, the smoke, smelling like burning plastic, fills our skies. Yesterday morning, our Air Quality Index reached over 400, the worst reading our city has ever recorded. Some cities to our north reached readings of over 700, hazardous for all mammals.

Now I don’t think this is a good thing. Firstly, it is just plain dangerous. Sunlight turns the smoke into deadly things like benzene, formaldehyde, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and ozone, some of which are carcinogenic and others which just make breathing difficult. In addition PM 2.5 particulates penetrate deep into our lungs. Then there is all that carbon dioxide, added to what we humans generate. We never used to have days like this. Changing climate conditions turn Canadian forests into tinderboxes. And many Canadians are dealing with far more dire conditions than we are.

The one consolation is that like the Snow Day, about all one can do is stay indoors (hopefully in an air-conditioned spot that filters and recycles the air) and enjoy a good book. But I manage to do that most days anyway. At least I have a good excuse to not do yard work! I would rather not have the excuse of Smoke Days. But I fear it is a new normal. Stay safe friends!

Five Articles Worth Reading

Everyone’s abuzz about Christopher Nolan’s new cinematic rendering of The Odyssey. In “We’ll Help You Find Your Next Great Book. (Spoiler: It’s the ‘Odyssey.’),” A.O. Scott suggests that no matter your taste in literature, there is something in The Odyssey for you. And he uses that to introduce us to several translations of Homer’s classic.

Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine concludes his Harlem Trilogy. David Hadju reviews it in “The Unapologetic Crime Fiction of Colson Whitehead.”

Batsheva Labowe-Stoll maintains the quest to develop artificial intelligence has often been religious in nature in “The Deep Spiritual History of AI.” For those familiar with Genesis, the efforts to develop AI have often seemed to me another Tower of Babel story.

Derek Thompson asks, “Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time? Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention? Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others? And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?” In conversation with philosopher Agnes Callard, Thompson discovers one idea that links these questions, the “uni-context.” Read “A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird” for the full interview.

Finally, I’ve often reflected on what an amazing intellectual Christian community the Inklings represented. Comment explores similar communities through history and around the world in “Seedbeds of Christian Humanism: A Gallery” The article links to articles devoted to 31 different communities.

Quote of the Week

This one was thought provoking. Is the search for truth a waking up from our dreams? So suggests Iris Murdoch, born July 15, 1919:

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”

Miscellaneous Musings

An example of the community the Inklings and Dorothy L. Sayers enjoyed is described in a new book, The Way of Dante by Richard Hughes Gibson. It’s a marvelous study of the interactions between C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Dorothy L. Sayers around a shared love of Dante. Not only did they challenge each other’s thinking but the encouragement of Williams and Lewis gave Sayers the courage to embark on a new translation of the Divine Comedy.

As seems usual with Jane Austen, I’m on tenterhooks to see if Anne Eliot and Captain Wentworth rekindle the romance Anne ended at the persuasion of Lady Russell, who judged the Captain unworthy of the family in Persuasion. Don’t tell me. I want to see if I’ve guessed it. This is number four of the Austen novels I’ve read this year.

He’s a MacArthur Fellow, has won numerous national awards, I love his writing, and he is from the city where i live. And now, Hanif Abdurraqib adds to all this the honor of being named the 2026 ABA Indie Bookstore Ambassador! Well done!

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Kathy Tuan-Maclean and Tara Edelschick, Moms on the Way

Tuesday: Donnie Berry, The Earth Will Be Filled

Wednesday: Ken Waters, Words That Shape Us

Thursday: Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

Friday: Jane Austen, Persuasion

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for July 12-18.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead. New York: Doubleday, 2016.

Summary: A fictional narrative of a Georgia slave, Cora, who with another slave escapes the plantation, and through a series of harrowing experiences, and the existence of an actual underground railroad with trains and engineers, escapes to the North.

The Underground Railroad has received critical acclaim, winning a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and being chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. This is a very good book, portraying the brutal realities of Antebellum slavery on cotton plantations, the brutalities of slave owners, overseers, patrollers and night riders, and slave hunters. The character of Ridgeway, the slave hunter, is among the great evil characters of fiction. The protagonist, Cora, is a resilient, even fiercely determined character who will murder more than on of her potential captors, even while both angered and motivated by her mother Mabel, who escaped while she was a little girl and never was caught.

Cora agrees to escape the Randall Plantation with Caesar when Terrence Randall, a tyrant, takes over for his deceased brother. Caesar has learned from a sympathetic merchant of an underground railroad that will take slaves to freedom. At the last minute, another slave, Lovey, joins in, but is soon captured while Caesar and Cora, who fatally bludgeons a young man attempts to hold her, escape and contact the station master. What they find is an underground railroad that is no metaphor but a vast subterranean rail network with rails, trains, and engineers, built by those engaged in the fight against slavery.

Their flight takes them to South Carolina, where they hide under assumed names in an “enlightened” town educating them for citizen, but with underlying sinister motives. Ridgeway shows up and Cora escapes, but Caesar is taken. Cora arrives unexpected at a closed down station in a North Carolina town on a freedom crusade of lynchings and house searches. Reluctantly, Martin and Ethel Wells shelter her, running a terrible risk. In the end Ridgeway finds her and takes her into Tennessee, where she is rescued by Royal, a militant version of Harriet Tubman. One of Ridgeway’s men is killed, Ridgeway bound and left to die, and they escape to a utopian Freedom Farm in Indiana. But will they be safe even here?

The plot is interrupted by “flashbacks” that fill in content, but felt like an interruption. But the feature that worked the least for me was the railroad. This aspect of the book had a magical realism feel, and just didn’t work for me, but then I’ve never been a fan of this technique/genre. It seems that the main function of the railroad was to get Cora to the next scene of action, where the real interest and the strength of this narrative lay. We see the courage of station masters, to be sure, but the actual journey, the risks run by slaves, and in many cases, rescuers like Tubman seemed to be minimized, even though the title suggests a focus on the railroad. I also found the decisions to stay in South Carolina, and later Indiana, somewhat implausible when all slaves knew their only chance of safety, especially from figures like Ridgeway, was Canada. I might have liked some documentation of sources for the portrayals slave conditions and race hatred, and some comment on what was based on fact, along the lines of what Stowe did in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

All in all, the plotline, strong characters, and portrayal of slavery and race hatred make this a good and important work. I think it could be more powerful if it portrayed the efforts of the historical underground railroad. But the portrayal of slavery and racism in this book is important to our nation conversation. To meaningfully, say “never again” we must understand to what we are saying “never again.”