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I suppose that I had never given much thought, myself, to the concept of resilience. I mean, everyone faces adversity, needs to fight back, blah blah blah, and so on. But Chemaly's book really does a great job of peeling back the layers of what is going on underneath all this resilience talk, and the degree to which people, in the name of resilience, end up burying their pain. Moreover, focusing on "resilience" takes the focus away from the people doing harm -- those who are causing everyone else to have to be resilient. It turns out to be a deeply individualistic concept, turning us away from community. As she writes on page 206, "It's a 'we-them' resilience that doesn't teach us how to survive adversity but how to survive the worst of one another." I confess that once I started thinking about resilience in the way that Chemaly outlines, the concept and its associated hyper-individualism seemed so deeply engrained in American life that I'm not sure how to overcome it, but the final chapter offers some useful thoughts.

Coates's chapter on his journey to Palestine is the longest chapter in this book and has gotten the most public attention upon the book's release. But there's a lot more than "just" that to sink your teeth into in this compact but thoughtful work. Coates begins with a moving, autobiographical account of his discovering the joy of reading. One chapter covers his trip to Dakar, and another covers a journey to South Carolina to meet dedicated teachers fighting against his own books being banned in public schools there. In that chapter, I was particularly struck by his account of his own evolution as a writer, realizing that he could not simply stand on the sidelines as others were risking their positions in the community to defend his writing. This introspection continues into the Palestine chapter, and I was struck by his general tone of "I really thought X, but now I understand Y," which gives the book a level of self-reflection perhaps not always shared by Coates's loudest critics. Coates ties the end of the book back to the beginning's love of language and story by considering what role an outsider, like him, has in telling the story of other people. We are fortunate, in 2025, to have a thinker and writer of Coates's skill among us, and as the South Carolina chapter makes clear, preserving artists of this skill is going to take all of us working in their defense.