Heart and Soul

Kadir Nelson confesses in his author’s note to Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans that history was never his favorite subject in school. Why, then, would he tackle a topic as vast as the history of African Americans? Because, he says, “the American story came alive to me” through his research,…

Today’s brave new literary culture seems to demand oddballs, preferably super ones. They can be benign oddballs, like Harry Potter, or dark ones (the vampire of your choice), but real people are somewhat out of fashion these days. Nevertheless, a brave coterie of writers, like Irish stalwart Maeve Binchy here in Heart and Soul, insists…