The Grace of Silence

NPR reporter Michelle Norris adeptly blends the personal, the journalistic, and the scholarly. She uses family experiences as starting points to investigate topics such as police violence in Birmingham and the image of Aunt Jemima. She brings both the intimate and the dry alive with a versatile voice that gives insight into the characters of the people she has talked with and studied. Her emotion brings alive her father's grace in illness and her mother's reaction to white flight. The book hits hardest in its chapters about Birmingham. There she researches the incident in which her father was shot by police, visits a now-dilapidated black neighborhood, and considers attitudes past and present toward race. J.A.S. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine