Grant Park

August 3, 2015
This high-stakes, hard-charging political thriller from Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Pitts (Freeman) tells the saga of two journalists, switching between the time periods of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination and election day 2008. Sixty-year-old Malcolm Toussaint is a popular black syndicated news columnist writing for the Chicago Post who has two Pulitzer Prizes and resides in a “trophy” mansion. However, he has grown “tired” if not embittered over the frustrating lack of progress in race relations between whites and blacks. After receiving one too many racist emails from his readers, he responds by composing a blunt, scathing column, but his white editor, Bob Carson, kiboshes it. After Malcolm hacks into Bob’s computer and publishes the controversial column anyway, both men are deemed culpable and fired. Following this, a pair of white supremacists kidnap Malcolm; they also reveal their heinous plan to detonate a “McVeigh bomb” in Grant Park when Barack Obama appears there, as the clock begins ticking to stop them. Pitts effectively builds the backstory in which young Malcolm witnesses King’s fatal shooting in Memphis, and young Bob falls in love with the political black activist Janeka Lattimore, who now resurfaces in his life. The sharply etched characters, careful attention to detail, and rich newspaper lore propel Pitts’s socially relevant novel.

August 1, 2015
In the aftermath of this summer's racially motivated mass murder in Charleston, South Carolina, by an avowed white supremacist, there's near-eerie prescience in Pitts' historical novel, which juxtaposes events 20 years apart in the lives of its characters.On Election Day 2008, Malcolm Toussaint, an African-American columnist for a Chicago daily, sets his career on fire by hacking an incendiary column about how he's "tired of white folks' bullshit" onto his paper's front page the day the country's about to elect its first black president. (Malcolm, embittered by a police shooting of an unarmed black man, is convinced Barack Obama's going to lose, no matter what the polls say.) His white editor, Bob Carson, whose computer was used without his permission to post the column, is fired, and he sets off to have it out with Malcolm. But that confrontation may have to wait because Malcolm's been abducted by a pair of white supremacists who plan to use the columnist in a terrorist attack on the eponymous park where the Obama campaign plans to celebrate its triumph that night. This Hitchcock-ian suspense story is interspersed with flashbacks to 1968, when a younger Malcolm, then a militant college dropout, encounters Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights leader's ill-fated trip to Memphis to aid striking garbage workers. There are also scenes during that same year of a younger, more idealistic Bob, whose interracial romance is sorely stress-tested by events in Memphis leading up to King's murder. Pitts, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist making his third foray into fiction (Before I Forget, 2009; Freeman, 2012), sometimes seems to strain for effect while moving two very different narratives along. And the book's setup seems almost too prefabricated. (Yes, there were older black activists who neither liked nor entirely trusted Obama that year, but hardly any of them doubted toward the end that he'd win.) Yet the novel's lapses are all but overwhelmed by its breakneck momentum, and it's infused with vivid characterizations and canny verisimilitude, especially in the '68 passages. For example: in the relative hagiography of the present day, it's hard for younger readers to believe that King didn't enjoy unilateral support from all African-Americans, especially at the time of his death. Hence the sardonic labeling of MLK as "De Lawd" by Malcolm and other Black Power advocates. Whatever its melodramatic excesses, Pitts' novel, with urgency and passion, makes readers aware that the mistakes of the past are neglected at the future's peril.

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Starred review from August 1, 2015
The state of U.S. race relations in 1968 and 2008 is seen through the eyes of two veteran Chicago newsmen, one black and one white, in this opportune novel. When Malcolm Toussaint's inflammatory column expressing black impatience with white bullshit is spiked on the eve of the 2008 presidential election, the Pulitzer Prizewinning writer uses the online password of his editor, Bob Carson, to post the piece on page one of his Chicago newspaper, resulting in both being fired. Losing his job pales in significance to losing his life when Toussaint is snatched by two white supremacists intending to set off a bomb in Grant Park when president-elect Obama gives his acceptance speech. Flashbacks provide the backstories of both principals, Toussaint, who legally changes his name to those of black revolutionaries, pushing for black power in the 1960s and frustrated by Martin Luther King, and Carson, who loses the black woman he falls in love with during his civil rights activism. Pitts (Freeman, 2012) adroitly blends history with fiction and actual figures (King, Obama) with characters in a plot that builds suspense around the supremacists' plans as anger between the races gives way to understanding. A novel as significant as it is engrossing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)