Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (Compact Disc)

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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval By Saidiya Hartman, Allyson Johnson (Read by) Cover Image
$24.99
This book is harder to get and may take several weeks if available. Please email info@mcnallyjackson.com with questions.

Staff Reviews


The characters in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments are rarely written about.  For the most part stories about women of color born into poverty are lost or erased, they survive only as names in the ledgers of correctional facilities, or a point of evidence in some sociologist's dissection of a social problem. Hartman's book is an in-depth study of just these kinds of girls, women who were part of the great migration to the north after Emancipation, girls who ended up in riots, or a chorus line, instead of a home or a steady job. Because there's so little concrete evidence about these women, Hartman's book is part fiction, part history, filled with exquisite descriptions of heartbreak and lost virginities and long nights, of the smell of summer in Harlem and the screech of voices on the Atlantic City boardwalk. This is history told as fiction because it is, in part, the only way it can be recovered, and I promise you it will be one of the most astonishingly beautiful books you have ever read.

— Madeleine

Product Details
ISBN: 9781665128650
ISBN-10: 1665128658
Publisher: HighBridge Audio
Publication Date: April 9th, 2019
Language: English